two; she died September 8, 1760. They had eight children, of whom, John, born July 13, 1729, married May 22, 1755, Lydia Moore. They joined the church October 31, 1756.

JOHN PARKER was a prominent man in Lexington. He was chosen assessor in 1764-65-66-74. When, in 1774 and early in 1775, the town of Lexington made an effort to organize a company of minute-men, we have a record over his signature in this language, which shows his military leadership, and seems the first note of preparation for the bloody drama so soon to be enacted:

Agreeable to the vote of the town I have received by the hands of the Selectmen the drums - there were two - provided by the town for the use of the Military Company, in this town, until the further order of the

town.

LEXINGTON, March 14, 1775.

JOHN PARKER.

But his greatest distinction was the part he took in the beginning of the military operations of the Revolution. Ten British officers rode up from Boston on the evening of April 18, toward Lexington, hoping to intercept any news of the movement of troops toward Concord. They dined on their way at Cambridge.

The Provincial Committee of Safety- Orne, Lee, Gray, and Heath — had adjourned from Concord to Menotomy, now Arlington. On the arrival there of the British troops, at midnight, they waked, and

ran, without dressing, into a field to elude them. Dr. Warren, a member of this committee, was meanwhile in Boston, watching the movements there. Both sides were anxious to avoid firing the first shot. The Continental and the Provincial congresses cautioned their committees, and the people generally, to use great forbearance.

He

John Parker commanded the company who stood bravely at their post on the 19th of April, 1775, -some seventy men, confronted by six hundred British regulars. Although the company contained such men as Lieutenant Edmund Munroe, and Ensign Robert Munroe, who had held commissions in the French War, with some twenty or thirty, both soldiers and officers, who had seen service in the field, Parker commanded such confidence that he was chosen above them all; and the issue showed they had committed no mistake. was firm, cool, and determined in the trying hour. He ordered his men to load their guns, but not fire unless fired upon first. When some few seemed inclined to falter, he said: "I will cause the first man to be shot down who quits the ranks without orders." Of Parker's company seventeen out of seventy were either killed or wounded. This shows that they stood their ground, and must have been fired upon at close range. Although eight of his men had been killed and several wounded in the morning, he rallied his company in the afternoon to meet the foe on their return from Concord, and fired upon them with execution.

Captain Parker led a detachment, forty-five men, of his company to Cambridge, upon call of the Provincial Congress, where they served from May 6 to May 10, 1775. And again, on the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, he marched with sixty-one of his company to Cambridge, ready for action.

Although his health was feeble at the time of the battle of Lexington, and a fatal disease continued its invasion of his physical strength, he marched to Cambridge in the following month, and again on the seventeenth of June, resolute for the defence of his country. It must have saddened his heart, after the heroic part he had taken in the beginning of the great struggle for liberty, that he could not live to witness its happy issue. He died September 17, 1775, at the age of forty-six.

In the Massachusetts State House there were placed two muskets, memorials of Captain Parker, the gift to the State of his grandson, Rev. Theodore Parker. On one is inscribed:

THE FIRST FIRE ARM

CAPTURED IN THE

WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.

and on the other:

THIS FIREARM WAS USED BY

CAPT. JOHN PARKER,

IN THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON,

APRIL 19TH,
1775.

These invaluable mementoes were received by the State authorities with appropriate ceremonies,

and are conspicuously suspended, for public view, in the Senate chamber of the State House.

The children of John and Lydia (Moore) Parker were seven, of whom John the 3d, born February 14, 1761, married, February 17, 1785, Hannah Stearns, born May 21, 1764. He died November 3, 1835, aged seventy-four; she died May 15, 1823, aged fifty-nine years. They had eleven children, the youngest of these was THEODORE, born August 24, 1810. He married, April 20, 1837, Lydia D. Cabot of Boston, daughter of John and Lydia (Dodge) Cabot, born September 12, 1813. They had no children.

My earliest acquaintance with Theodore Parker dates back to the days of our boyhood. Living in the central district of Lexington, where, as the wages of the school-teacher were higher than in the outside sections, and the appropriations equal, our portion was soonest exhausted, I was sent by my parents to finish the winter's schooling at some one of the outer districts. One season it was my lot to go a few weeks to the same school with Theodore. He was a very bright boy and a pleasant companion. His schoolmates found it needed a spur to keep pace with him in his rare progress. I remember well the old family mansion, which had been a homestead back to 1712. There was the well of the fathers, with its high mounted sweep and its "old oaken bucket," in use, I believe, to this day. And there, near the house, stood the old belfry building which, on the site of the

present monument on the Common, rang forth the alarm that called Parker and his company to arms on the memorable nineteenth of April, 1775. This venerable relic was obtained by his family, and removed to the ancient estate where it is in part still standing.

In November 1879, I visited the old Parker homestead, then occupied by a nephew of his name and family, and entered the old workshop where Theodore's father long labored at his bench; and where the son, no doubt, must in his early days have worked with his own hands. What memories clustered around that belfry workshop! Here the child and the youth, surrounded by field and wood, in the simple home-life of his venerated and wise mother, and his modest, faithful father, must have meditated great thoughts and pious resolves, and been trained to become afterward the worldrenowned preacher and writer, whose words have gone out so far and sunk so deeply into thousands of revering minds and loving hearts. I brought away with me, the gift of the kind nephew, as a precious souvenir, a block of one of the very timbers that supported the bell which, April 19, 1775, rang forth the first summons to battle in the cause of American freedom and independence.

Theodore Parker came of a family who were farmers or mechanics. His father not only cultivated the land, but bored pumps, in which occupation I often saw him employed at my father's house, - a plain man of quiet manners,