H.H. Perry, the colorful, constantly controversial Gainesville lawyer in the early 1900s, who never met a political race he didn’t like, also had a penchant for taking on titans in the community or wherever he found them. For instance, early in his career, either naively or courageously, he ruffled the feathers of the United Daughters of the Confederacy just as they were planning to erect a statue on the square in memory of the area’s Confederate dead. He accused the UDC of “slaying trees” around what was then called a park in the middle of Gainesville.