John Howland Wood, born in 1816 in Dutchess County, New York, trained in the mercantile trade and apprenticed to a painter before enlisting in the New York Battalion to aid the Texas revolution. He arrived in Texas in 1836 in time to participate in the Battle of San Jacinto and several other major events at the close of the war. Wood settled at Victoria as quartermaster of the Texas Army and married Nancy Anna Clark in 1842; together they became civic and political leaders and the parents of twelve children. The family moved to St. Mary's, later called Bayside, where they opened a mercantile business, acquired vast land holdings throughout the state, and where John established himself as a cattleman. In 1849 they purchased this property and established a ranch that Nancy Wood named Bonnie View. After lightning damaged the original house, a new residence was built on its foundations in 1875 by contractors Viggo Kohler and Hugo Heldenfels. The structure combines a typical Greek revival plan with exuberant high Victorian Italianate detailing, including a two-tiered, full-height projecting portico supported by Italianate columns, pedimented window surrounds, bracketed eaves, and a widow's walk or captain's walk reflecting the architecture of John Wood's native New York. On the rural Texas coast, where few mansions were built, the house stood out during the post-Civil War era as an outstanding example of the Italianate style and remains one of the area's most substantial and least-altered country mansions of the period.