Talk:I. B. Perrine
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Talk:I.B. Perrine
my great grandfather, IB Perrine, drove the first dairy herd of milk cows to the Twin Falls area from Logan, Utah.
He had come from North Bend, Indiana at age 22 to seek his fortune as a miner in Hailey, but was too small of stature to work in the mines. His father was a Baptist minister and the descendent of Daniel Perrin, the Huegonaut of La Rochell, France. He had experience milking cows and found that there were no cows or milk in Hailey. So he rode a horse to Ogden, Utah, where he purchased a small herd of cows and drove them to Hailey, Idaho. When winter came with so much snow that he needed a place to 'winter-over' his herd, he consulted a Mr. Walgamott, hotelier at Shoshone Falls and was told he could take them down in the Snake River Canyon, to the Blue Lakes, west of the Twin Falls, on the Snake River and there the grasses were sweet and the snow much less. And the rest is history: Strawberries for the Oregon Trail pioneers, Apple Orchards and cider, Grape vines, white Mulberry trees, herds of sheep, bees, beekeeper and honey, [the 'Brook (Beekeepers) Lodge' is the only dwelling still intact, standing on the banks of Alpheus Creek, directly across the road from the Perrine Homestead].
He used dynamite to make the graded North Side road [it took him 7 years] which is the present day access to Blue Lakes Country Club. South side grade ran under 'the coulee' a water fall on the south canyon wall that froze into a tunnel in the winter. He created a ferry across the Snake River, established the old toll bridge down in the canyon later built above the canyon Rim to Rim, platted out the 'city' of Twin Falls, with streets designed to get the morning and evening sun in the winter and shade in the summer. He advertised Twin Falls, encouraging homesteaders to settle in Twin Falls during the Carey Homestead Act years. He ran the stagecoach between Twin Falls, Shoshone Falls and the train station at Shoshone, where he met and married my great grandmother, Hortense Genevieve McKay - daughter of the Shoshone Hotelier, Donald McKay, who had come around the horn in 1849 for the first gold rush and was a founding father of Hailey, Idaho. To finance the Milner Dam, Perrine contacted investors from Pittsburg,PA - Mssrs. Buhl, Hollister, and Kimberly to build the N & S side irrigation canals and make the desert bloom as a Rose. Trout farms and famous Spring Blossom Parties came later. He was Awarded Gold and Silver Medals for his fruit at the Paris World Exposition of 1900 and the St. Louis World's Fair, the first Idaho State Fair, the Chicago World Fair and the San Francisco World Fair. He invited William Jennings Bryan to speak from the balcony at the Perrine Hotel during Bryan's Presidential candidacy. They remained fast friends for many years, often staying at the Blue Lakes Ranch and Bryan with his wife and daughter, placed 3 Rock Piles on the north rim of the canyon wall as mementos of their visits. The rock spires can be seen today, looking NW from the golf course. My grandmother, Stella Perrine Haight, remembered cooking for Mr Bryan. He was a very large man who ate a dozen eggs, a rasher of bacon and a whole loaf of toasted bread for breakfast. He knew and corresponded with Thomas Alva Edison and Luther Burbank, who sent him some hybrid apple branch cuttings - which he grafted on his established Rome Apple Trees bearing the first Red and Golden Delicious Apples in Idaho. It has been a family legend that Edison's wife told IB that on the night before TE died, he had said to her: "I must call Perrine in the morning." We will never know what he had in mind to discuss, but IB had recieved the first light bulb in S.Idaho and was contemplating Electric RR cars to carry people to see the falls, as the gasoline powered internal combustion engine motor cars started to become the popular mode of travel. He had a keen sense of humor as witnessed by Photos of him dressed in the full white coat outfit of a motorist, posing by a Stanley Steamer, which he returned to it's donor, because it could not "make the grade" on either the North or South canyon roads. Another Photo shows him with his full 3-piece suit standing in the orchards with an apple on top of his hat and cherries hanging from his ears.
