limestone bluff that rose nearly 100 feet above the river, at which the pair would found Quincy, Illinois. At the land office, Wood also met Edward Coles, who would become Illinois' second governor in 1822. Appointed the federal land registrar by President James Monroe, Virginian Coles had released his eleven slaves while on the way to Illinois to take his post. As governor, Coles recruited Wood's help to fight a movement from 1822 to 1824 by the Illinois General Assembly, dominated by immigrants from Southern states, to amend the constitution to make Illinois a slave state. A referendum on August 3, 1824, for a constitutional convention for that purpose failed statewide by a ratio of 57 to 43 percent. In the territory in which John Wood fought the proposal, the plan for a slave constitution was defeated 90 to 10 percent. Wood considered his work to keep Illinois a free state one of his life's greatest achievements. On September 14, 1824, Wood petitioned the Illinois General Assembly to organize Adams County, Illinois and on January 18, 1825, the measure passed. On April 30, 1825, the unincorporated town of Quincy, Illinois, was designated the county seat. Wood continued to buy land in the Military Tract and sold it at a profit to immigrants arriving in Illinois. With his family growing, Wood in 1835 began construction of a 14-room Greek Revival mansion, the John Wood Mansion, next to his two-story log cabin. His choice of the Greek Revival architectural style was purposeful. The American Revolution fading from memory and the War of 1812 two decades earlier, Wood saw the recent overthrow of the Ottoman Empire by the Greeks, the birthplace of Democracy in 800 A.D., a rebirth of freedom. The Wood home was among the first Greek Revival structures in the Illinois. Wood himself turned the four large columns at the front of a house from coffeywood trees, which he selected, on a horse-powered lathe he fabricated. He built the home on the northwest side of today's 12th and State Street intersection. He found his craftsmen in St. Louis and New Orleans, where he sought men arriving from Germany who were skilled in construction trades. Fluent in German, Wood promised the men lots on the south side of his property on which they could build their homes if they would help Wood build his. The area today is Quincy's German Heritage District.