Gardner Parker

Born	1808-09-19
Died	1883-09-12
Representative to the General Court
In Office	1846 - 1846
Succeeded by	Harvey Crosby
Representative to the General Court
In Office	1849 - 1849
Preceded by	Reuben Chamberlain
Select Board
In Office	1849 - 1851
Preceded by	Marshall Preston
Succeeded by	Benjamin L. Judkins
Select Board
In Office	1861 - 1869
Preceded by	Dudley Foster
Succeeded by	Dudley Foster
Overseer of the Poor
In Office	1865 - 1866
Town Assessor
In Office	1865 - 1866
Howe School Trustee
In Office	1872 - 1883
Preceded by	John Baldwin
Succeeded by	Christopher C. Hussey
Father	Stephen Parker
Children	Fred (b. 1847-02-18) John (b. 1851-07-10)

Gardner Parker was born on September 19, 1808, a son of Stephen Parker and grandson of the tanner John Parker. He spent his life on the ancestral Kidder-Parker place on River Street, the homestead his father had bought back from the Kidder heirs, and in 1841 he married Adeline M. Wilson, daughter of Daniel Wilson.

He was, in Hazen's words, "active and useful in town affairs." He represented Billerica in the General Court in 1846 and 1849 as its representative, and he served as a selectman from 1849 to 1851 and through the Civil War years from 1861 to 1869, when he was also the revenue assessor. The war cost him his son Stephen Henry, killed at Petersburg on July 30, 1864. He was one of the committee that raised the Soldiers' Monument on the common, a trustee of the Howe School and president of its trustees, and the first-named member of the committee the town appointed in 1869 to prepare a history of Billerica, under whose auspices Hazen's History of Billerica was published in 1883.

Gardner Parker died on September 12, 1883. Of his sons, Frederick Hunt Parker became a Lowell merchant and John Nelson Parker succeeded him on the homestead and in town affairs; his brother was Dr. Daniel Parker, and his sister Clarissa Osborn gave the site of the Bennett Library. In her 1898 address on the old families of the First Parish, Mrs. M. H. Sage remembered him as "long active in town affairs, a trustee of our Howe School, one of the committee for the erection of our soldiers' monument, and their good friend during the Civil War."

The River Street building put up as a grammar school in 1865 became Gardner Parker Hall, where Billerica held its town meetings in the 1890s and where the Billerica Historical Society was founded in 1894; it burned on February 26, 1940. In 1953 the town opened the Parker School on River Street, near the Kidder-Parker homestead, carrying the family's name.

Gardner Parker

Gardner Parker

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