In 1825, he was elected a member of the State Senate, and was twice re-elected to the same position.
In 1830, he was elected President Judge of the Third Judicial Circuit.
In 1833, he was elected a Judge of the Supreme Court, and at the close of his term was re-elected. For the last three years of his second term he was Chief Justice. As a Judge he was noted for sound logic, and the clearness of his decisions.
In 1850, Judge Wood was elected by the Democratic party Governor of the State by eleven thousand majority, and was re-elected Governor in 1851, under the new constitution, by a majority of twenty-six thousand.
In 1853, he was appointed, by the Government, Consul to Valparaiso, South America. While there, he, for some months, at the request of the Government, discharged the duties of a Minister Plenipotentiary to Chili.
On his return from Chili, he returned to his farm in Rockport, near Cleveland, where he died, October 2, 1864, generally esteemed, and highly respected by all who knew him.
John W. Willey.
John W. Willey was a native of New Hampshire, being born in 1797. He pursued a regular course of study at Dartmouth College, under the encouragement of the distinguished President Wheelock, after whom he had been named. He studied law in New York.
In 1822, being then twenty-five years of age, he came West and settled in Cleveland. At that time it had but one tavern, no church, no railroads, no canal, an occasional steamboat only, three or four stores and a few hundred inhabitants; such was the then picture of a settlement now approaching to a city of a hundred thousand people. Small as Cleveland then was, professionally, Mr. Willey had been preceded by men of decided ability. Alfred Kelley, Leonard Case, and the late Gov. Wood, had taken possession of the field four, six and twelve years before him, and were men of far more than ordinary ability. Mr. Willey was peculiarly adapted to such circumstances as these. Thoroughly versed in legal principles, of a keen and penetrating mind, a logician by nature, fertile and ready of expedient, with a persuasive eloquence, enlivened with wit and humor, he at once rose to prominence at the bar of Northern Ohio. The Cuyahoga bar was for many years considered the strongest in the State, but amongst all of its talented members, each with his own peculiar forte, for the faculty of close and long-continued reasoning, clearness of statement, nice discrimination, and never ending ingenuity, he had no superior.
In 1827, Mr. Willey was partially withdrawn from practice, by being elected to the Legislature, where he served three years as Representative and three as Senator, until 1832.