William Perrott was born in Michigan, orphaned at 6, went west at 17, first riding shot gun on a military ammunition wagon train to Salt Lake City, then joining three other mounted horsemen, to guard a pack train to California, arriving in 1859. He may have been of French Huguenot stock, by way of Cork, Ireland.
William Perrott (1842-1911)
William worked in the bay area, met and married Humboldt County resident Sarah Jane van Duzer in 1864. They moved to Humboldt and took a 640 acre land grant, the Perrott homestead, next to Sarah van Duzer’s family in 1865. The railroad from San Francisco to Eureka came through the Perrott homestead in the 1880’s, and the town of Swager, later renamed Loleta, grew up on the railroad (on the Perrott ranch).
William Perrott and his wife Sarah Jane van Duzer Perrott (1845–1937)
Their daughter Laura Perrott Mahan (1867-1937)
Laura Perrott Mahan, daughter of William and Sarah, was a cofounder of the Humboldt County Women’s Save The Redwood League. She discovered Pacific Lumber logging in what is now Rockefeller Grove in November 1924. Laura stood in the line of fall of the giant redwood, stopping loggers, while she dispatched her lawyer husband to Eureka to get an injunction, saving the virgin Redwood grove (near Weott) for posterity.
California Redwood State Park bronze monument near signboard designating PERROTT GROVE, California Humboldt Redwood State Park, about a mile south of Weott on ‘scenic’ 101, a gift by the Humboldt County pioneer Perrott’s first generation William Perrott