Willis Perrine’s Roundabout Life

Willis Perrine’s Roundabout Life                                                    by Alan Borer

What do you do with a stack of old pictures that are not labeled?  The sheep-shearing party shown here is interesting as a way of looking into the past and how things have changed.  Other pictures in this group show barns, farm wagons, corn shocks, and family groups.  Very interesting, but could we attach a name to the pile?  Luckily, a few of the photos have a tiny hand stamp on their backs, marking them as property of W. A. Perrine, Toledo, Ohio.  And while I still do not know if these are siblings, cousins, or distant relatives, I could at least gather some clues from the story of Mr. Perrine.

Born in 1874 near Oakwood in Paulding County, Willis A. Perrine likely grew up on a farm.  His parents were Ithamar and Jane Perrin, who, later in life, lived in Continental in Putnam County.  Ithamar (some records spell it Ithmar) was a farmer, and his son Willis likely grew up on his father’s farm.  By 1903, he was living in Toledo where his occupation was railroad brakemen.  That year, he married Mary E. Hansen of Bettsville.  They had a daughter, Margaret.  Although he does not appear to have served, Willis’s World War I draft card showed him living at 1704 Oak Street and working as a “freight conductor” on the Pennsylvania Railroad.  Aged 44, the draft clerk described him as average height, slender build, dark blue yes, and gray hair.

In 1920, the Perrine family was still in Toledo.  On June 29, 1926 Mary Perrine died in Mansfield; Willis had moved his family there sometime in the early 1920s.  Willis married a woman named Ada.  By 1933, daughter Margaret was back in Toledo, living at 833 Broadway where married a Pennsylvanian,  Leroy Thieme.  The couple moved to California.  Meanwhile, Willis and Ada Perrine lived on in Mansfield.  Ada died in 1958; Willis died in 1961 and is buried next to his first wife in Old Fort, Ohio, near her hometown of Bettsville.

The picture mentioned above, printed with a postcard back for easy sharing, shows men watching what was a newfangled contraption in the 1910s.  For many centuries before this scene, sheep farmers sheered their sheep with hand held clippers, the design of which changed little for a thousand years.  Once electricity was available, shepherds had the ease of powered shearing machinery.  Much of rural America did not have electricity until the Rural Electrification program of the Depression era.  But between hand clippers and electric ones, there was the “Sheep Shearing Machine.”

If a shepherd wanted the speed of a power clipper, but did not have access to automatic power, they had the option of hand-cranked energy.  As can be seen in the photo, the man on the right did the shearing.  One can imagine that he needed to shear as fast as he could, problematic as sheep dance around and struggle when being shaved!  That is where the man on the left came in.  The shearing machine cranked a cable, which fed power to the clipping mechanism.  It must have been dull and repetitious to crank the power supply, but this machine was so much faster than the old hand clippers that it was eagerly adopted by sheep men.

People nowadays are very mobile.  What with (relatively) cheap gas, interstate highways, and satellite maps, almost anyone can up and move 1000 miles in the time it takes to pack the moving van – faster if you just want to stay for a weekend.  But I enjoyed looking into the less extravagant world off Willis A. Perrine of Paulding, Toledo, Mansfield, and Old Fort.