Cyrus Woodman was born in Buxton, Maine, June 2, 1814, of an old and respected New England family. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1836, studied law for several years, and was admitted to practice at Boston in 1839. In 1840 he left the East for Illinois in the employ of the Boston & Western Land Company, where he remained for four years.
In 1844 he came to Wisconsin Territory and entered into partnership with C. C. Washburn, who was engaged at Mineral Point in building up a law and collection agency. He remained with Washburn for eleven years, the firm gradually dropping its law business, and devoting itself to land operations and banking. In 1852, after the passage of the Wisconsin banking law, the firm opened the Mineral Point Bank, which for three years did a conservative business, winning the confidence of the entire lead-mining region. In 1855 Washburn was elected to Congress by his district, and by mutual agreement the partnership was dissolved.
The following year Woodman took his family to Europe, where he remained until 1858, educating his children in French and German schools. He returned to Mineral Point in the summer of 1858, and continued there, occupied with land, lumbering, and mining enterprises until 1862.
Driven to seek employment in other fields by the hard times which hung over the West from 1857 to 1862, Woodman turned his steps to his old haunts in the East. He soon received an offer, however, to take charge of the lands of the St. Mary's Ship Canal Company, which in 1862 brought him once more to the West, this time to Detroit, Michigan. For two years he remained in the employ of this Company as managing director of its lands, a position of much responsibility, which brought him into business contact with many prominent capitalists of New England.
In 1864 he retired from this work and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had previously sent his family. Here he remained for the rest of his life, continuing, however, to conduct many business enterprises in the West. In May, 1869, he was prevailed upon by the managers of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad to accept temporarily the vice-presidency of the subsidiary Burlington & Missouri River Railroad of Nebraska, of which he was a large stockholder. In accepting this position it was understood that his work was to consist only in superintending the construction of the line to Lincoln, the capital of Nebraska. As soon as the task was completed, he resigned, and returned to the more congenial surroundings of his Cambridge home.
Though he continued throughout his life to have business interests in the West, notably in Wisconsin, more and more as age crept on, Woodman devoted himself to historical studies and general reading. In the last years of his life he took a trip with his family to Alaska. He died suddenly at his home in Cambridge on March 30, 1889, at the age of seventy-five.
