Washington Hood Drawings

The Washington Hood Collection contains prints, drawings, and manuscript materials which seem to have been Hood's working collection as a surveyor, architect, engineer, and artist. It includes original maps and drawings related to his explorations and mapping activities with the Army.

Washington Hood was born on February 2, 1808, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest of twelve children born to John McClellan Hood, a wholesale grocer, and Eliza Forebaugh. He won an appointment to the United States Military Academy and graduated in 1827. Between 1831 and 1836, he served on topographical duty and in 1835 was promoted to first lieutenant. Hood resigned his commission in 1836 and worked as a civil engineer in Cuba for a year. He then reentered the army as a captain in the Topographical Engineers. In 1835, he worked with fellow West Pointer Robert E. Lee to determine the boundary line between the state of Ohio and Michigan Territory. He later did some mapping of the Oregon Territory. While on an expedition ordered by President Van Buren in 1839 to survey the Shawnee timberlands bordering Arkansas and Missouri, Hood contracted a fatal disease from which he succumbed in July, 1840 at Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania. In addition to his topographical work, Hood designed buildings and worked as a portrait copyist in Washington, D.C. Hood is listed in the Dictionary of American Biography and in Who Was Who.