History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century/4/William B. Perrin
WILLIAM B. PERRIN was born at Berlin, Vermont, January 19, 1839. His education began in the public school and was continued in Barre Academy and Dartmouth College. His studies were interrupted by enlistment in the First Rhode Island Cavalry, Company B, composed for the most part of college students. The company was attached to the Army of the Potomac and saw service in the Shenandoah Valley, the Antietam campaign and at Harper's Ferry. Mr. Perrin later enlisted in the Third Vermont Light Battery, was in the campaign from the Wilderness to Petersburg and at the surrender of the Confederate army under General Lee at Appomattox. After the war Mr. Perrin continued his studies at Dartmouth, graduating in 1866. He took a course of lectures at the Albany Law School in 1866-7, came to Iowa and entered the law office of Tracy and Newman at Burlington. In 1868 he located at Nashua, in Chickasaw County which became his permanent home. He is a veteran legislator, having served in the House of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth General Assemblies, and in the Senate of the Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth General Assemblies.