History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century/4/William B. Martin
WILLIAM B. MARTIN was born March 17, 1846, at Rochester, Vermont. He was reared on a farm and educated in the public schools and the Orange County Grammar School. At eighteen he began teaching, which he continued for three years. In 1867 he went west locating on a farm in Henry County, Illinois, where he taught school winters. In 1869 he removed to Adair County, Iowa, where on the wild prairie he improved a farm. He was elected auditor of the county in 1873 and after serving four years entered into the real estate business in Greenfield, and in 1890 was mayor of the town. In 1893 he was elected on the Republican ticket Representative in the House of the Twenty-fifth General Assembly and as a member of the committee on the suppression of intemperance he devised the Mulct Law, which so changed the prohibition acts as to permit the legal voters in towns and cities to determine whether saloons should be established within their jurisdiction. Mr. Martin was reëlected to the Twenty-sixth General Assembly where, as chairman of the building and loan committee he framed and secured the passage of an act regulating the business of such organizations. In 1899 Mr. Martin was nominated by the Republican State Convention for Secretary of State and elected by the largest majority ever given in Iowa to a candidate for a State office. He was elected for a second term in 1902.