Background
He was born on April 5, 1797 at Cranbury, New Jersey, United States, the son of Peter and Sarah (Rozengrant) Perrine. He was a descendant of Daniel Perrin, a French Huguenot who settled in New Jersey in 1665.
He was born on April 5, 1797 at Cranbury, New Jersey, United States, the son of Peter and Sarah (Rozengrant) Perrine. He was a descendant of Daniel Perrin, a French Huguenot who settled in New Jersey in 1665.
He studied medicine.
As a youth he taught school at Rockyhill, New Jersey. In September 1819, he settled at Ripley, where he practised medicine energetically for five years, earning the local sobriquet "little hard-riding doctor. "
His health had been very seriously affected by arsenical poisoning sustained accidentally in 1821, and two years later, in an effort to improve his condition, he sought the milder climate of Natchez, Mississippi, practising there until 1827 when he accepted an appointment as United States Consul at Campeche, Mexico.
His project resulted from a circular letter sent out in 1827, at the instance of President John Quincy Adams, calling upon consular officers to procure foreign plants of known or probable utility for cultivation in the United States. Perrine took the request very seriously, and before long he was flooding the Treasury, State, and Navy Departments with detailed reports on officinal and other economic plants, especially those producing durable fibers. Much of this matter is published in government documents which relate to a plan, proposed by Perrine in 1832, of establishing a tropical plant introduction station in extreme southern Florida upon land to be granted him by Congress.
Not until 1838, a year after his return to the United States, was the law finally passed by which he and two associates received the provisional grant of a township on Biscayne Bay. A nursery which he had begun on Indian Key in 1833 contained, at the time of the grant, over 200 species and selected varieties of useful tropical plants. He spent almost two years here, tending and extending the nurseries, but the period of happy activity was abruptly cut short by his death at the hands of marauding Indians.
Henry Perrine truly deserves to rank as a pioneer of plant introduction in America. Of great importance was his persistent and enthusiastic effort to introduce useful tropical plants into southern Florida. During his years of continuous residence he made botanical collections which are now preserved in the herbarium of the New York Botanical Garden. Of all the plants introduced by Perrine the sisal (Agave sisalana), which he first described, is the most noteworthy. This and a closely related species, the henequen (Agave fourcroyodes), he had introduced upon the Florida Keys in 1833.
Perrine was noted for his quick sympathies and devotion to duty.
On January 8, 1822, he married Ann Fuller Townsend, the daughter of the Rev. Jesse Townsend of Denham, New York.
