(March 1842 – September 28, 1912)
from The Greenwood Project
George Woods, memorialized on a historical marker near the Greenwood Cemetery entrance, was almost certainly Tennessee’s first African American archaeological technician. When Harvard University’s Frederic Ward Putnam came to Tennessee to excavate Davidson and Wilson County sites for the Peabody Museum (1877), his foreman Edwin Curtiss hired brothers George and Joe Woods as laborers on the project. The Woods brothers acquired a reputation for competence and dependability, and, after Curtiss’s sudden death, Professor Putnam himself began to correspond with George Woods about continuing Harvard’s archaeological efforts in Tennessee. In 1882 Putnam hired Woods as foreman on the Jarman and Hunt digs, and, after he returned to Harvard, arranged for Woods to continue digging and collecting artifacts for the Peabody from those two excavations as well as the Noel and Cooper Farm digs (1885-1890). In the Tennessee State Museum’s Gates Thruston Collection are several artifacts collected by George Woods, who, in later years, worked as a blacksmith, railroad porter, and quarryman.
____________________
The Greenwood Project is a series of 160-word biographies of individuals who lie at rest in Mt. Ararat and Greenwood cemeteries, two historic African American burial grounds in Nashville, Tennessee. The project, which began in September 2014 (and is still available on Facebook, at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064806156276), shares the stories of more than 300 consequential individuals, primarily African American, who changed the course of city, state, and national history through their words and deeds. (All biographies were written by Kathy Lauder unless otherwise noted.)
Nashville Historical Newsletter 