Person · 1806 - 1890

Daniel Parker

Born	1806-10-28 Billerica, MA
Died	1890-01-06
Physician
In Office	1840 - 1890
Father	Stephen Parker
Mother	Sibbel Parker
Spouses	Mary Bryant (m. 1844-09-23 )

Daniel Parker (1806-1890), Billerica's physician for half a century, was born in Billerica on October 28, 1806, a son of Stephen Parker and his second wife, Sibbel, and a grandson of the tanner John Parker. He grew up on the ancestral Kidder homestead on River Street, to which his father had moved after 1800 and which his younger brother Gardner Parker later inherited. Among his sisters were Mary, wife of Rev. Rodney Gove Dennis, and Clarissa, later Mrs. William Osborn, who gave the site of the Bennett Library.

He studied medicine at Bowdoin College, which gave him the degree of M.D. in 1833, and from 1840 he practised as a physician in his native town; Hazen's list of Billerica physicians dates his practice from that year, and in 1883 Hazen could still write that he "practises his profession in his native town." On September 23, 1844, he married Mary E. Bryant, daughter of Nathan and Mary E. Bryant of Bedford; the marriage record gives his age as 38 and hers as 17. They had four children: Clarissa Maria (1848-1876), Frederick E. (1851-1853), Mary Alice, born in 1852, and Susan C. (1855-1858).

When Billerica celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of its incorporation on May 29, 1855, the committee on the poem invited Dr. Parker, as a native and resident of the town, to deliver it, and Hazen's genealogy of the Parker family records him as the author of the Bi-Centennial poem. Dr. Parker died on January 6, 1890, aged 83 years, 2 months and 9 days, and his death stands in the town clerk's register of deaths for that year.

Daniel Parker

Daniel Parker

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