Rev Thomas William Woodrow

Thomas Wodrow was born in 1793, himself a direct descendant of several generations of Presbyterian preachers and scholars. he and his wife from the Scottish Highlands lived in Paisley until 1820, when he became the first of this family in five hundred years to leave Scotland. They moved to Carlisle, England, where he presided over a Congregationalist church and, in accordance with the local pronunciation, changed the spelling of his name to Woodrow. They had eight children. On November 10, 1835, Thomas Woodrow took his family to Liverpool, where they boarded a ship for New York, joining a massive exodus of his parishioners who could no longer endure their hardscrabble existence. Gales prolonged what should have been a six-week voyage into a horrific sixty-two days, beset with rationing and flooding. As the ship approached Newfoundland, a storm shredded its sails to rags. One day fair enough for the children to play topside, Janet Woodrow-age nine-was swinging on a rope when the ship suddenly lurched, nearly throwing her overboard. Only her grasp on that lifeline kept her from drowning. Landing in subzero weather in January 1936, the Woodrows found lodging in the city, and within weeks, the reverend was invited to serve a Presbyterian congregation in Poughkeepsie, New York, eighty miles up the Hudson River. He had preached but two Sabbaths when he was summoned back to Manhattan, only to learn that his wife had died four days prior. He soon accepted a "generous and kind offer" to teach and raise a congregation in Brockville, Ontario, but after one brutally cold winter there, he moved his family to Chillicothe, a town in south-central Ohio in need of a pastor. Over the next twelve years, Woodrow's sermons failed to fill the pews of his church. In 1843, he married a young widow, Harried Love Renick, who bore him six more children. Disengaging from his first family, he drifted from one remote parish to another. He died in 1877 at age 84.