John Parker

Died	1667-06-14 Billerica, MA
Town Founder
In Office	1654 - 1655
Town Clerk
In Office	1657 - 1664
Succeeded by	William Tay
Tax Collector
In Office	1658 - 1658
Select Board
In Office	1660 - 1667

"John deserves to be recognized among the foremost in the settlement of this town," wrote Hazen of John Parker. It is not known whence he came, or when he arrived in America. He leased and lived upon the large farm belonging to the church in Cambridge, north of the Woburn road, on both sides of the Shawshin River, and his house there was an important centre of the early town: town meetings were held in it, and it was there that Jonathan Danforth came for his bride. Parker's wife was the widow of John Poulter, who was of Rayleigh, in Essex, not far from Billericay. The wife of Jonathan Danforth, Elizabeth Poulter, was her daughter, but Mr. Parker had no children; he and Danforth call each other father-in-law and son-in-law. John Kittredge, ancestor of the Kittredge family, came to Billerica in Parker's service and called him his "master."

Parker was the first town clerk; Farmer's 1816 memoir says he was approved as clerk in December 1657, and Hazen describes his clerkship as beginning that year. His original record of births, marriages and deaths is the one that settles the claim of Samuel, son of George Farley, to be the first child born in the town. He kept the record in the first person ("by order & advise of ye Townsmen, I did agree" he wrote of hiring the first sexton, William Haile), and Hazen observed that "he intends his language to be explicit, if it is sometimes a trifle redundant and ungrammatical." He was also the first collector of taxes: in January 1658/9 the town empowered him "to gather, receiue, and take up" the sums due on the rate for building the minister's house, with power to distrain the goods of anyone who refused to pay. He was one of the selectmen in the first recorded list of town officers, in March 1659/60, and that year the town chose him to carry its votes and to attend the General Court with its petition for the Weld farm. He appears in the records as Sergeant Parker.

Whatever the town had to do, John was very likely to do it. He was the agent of the town in locating and disposing of its two large grants from the General Court. In August 1658 the inhabitants gave him "full power to make sale" of the 8000 acres at Naticott on the Merrimack; within a month he had sold them to Brenton, the Boston merchant William Brenton, for 200 pounds, and bound himself to use the proceeds to buy the Cambridge lots within the town and so extinguish the Cambridge titles. Of the second grant, 4000 acres given in 1661 and used variously for the town's benefit, 1000 acres went to Parker and Danforth jointly for the cost of finding and laying out the whole, and the other 3000 to Parker, in return for 40 pounds he was to pay to the minister, Samuel Whiting, and "for satisfaction in full for charges due to ye said John about building of our meeting house." In July 1662 Parker, Danforth and Thomas Henchman deeded 1,600 acres of it, at Salmon Brook in what became Dunstable, to Thomas Brattle. In 1663/4 the town sold him the mill lot of 44 acres.

He built the first meetinghouse, raised in 1659 and 1660, thirty feet long and twenty-four wide with a thatched roof. The town's committee, William Tay, William Hamlet and Danforth, examined his accounts in the winter of 1661/2, found 18 pounds, 15 shillings and 3 pence due to him, and recommended that the town make it a full 20 pounds, since he had paid out better money than he received. In 1661 he was one of four men chosen to sit in the deacons' seat and help the minister assign every family its place in the meetinghouse.

He d. 1667, June 14 (the town record of deaths calls him "Sergt."), and if born in 1600, he was four years older than his wife. She married April 16, 1674 to Thomas Chamberlain of Chelmsford, and died there on February 8, 1692/3, aged 88. Mr. Parker's extensive enterprises left his estate insolvent, his creditors receiving 15 shillings and 6 pence per pound. The Church farm he had leased passed to Thomas Richardson.

John Parker

John Parker

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