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Arthur Cortlandt Parker
First Sergeant 33d Mass. Vols. (Infantry), July 21, 1862; Second Lieutenant, March 3, 1863; killed by guerillas near Bristow Station, Va., August 24, 1863.at the end of the undergraduate course at Harvard University each student is requested to write an autobiography, which is preserved as part of the Class records; and perhaps this memoir cannot be better prefaced than by a part of the brief paper which Lieutenant Parker then contributed.
I was born in Boston, October 21, 1840. My father, William Parker, is the Superintendent of the Panama Railroad,—formerly Superintendent of the Boston and Worcester, Baltimore and Ohio, and Boston and Lowell roads. He was educated at Captain Partridge's military school. I belong to the Parkers of New Jersey, who came over from England in 1670. All my paternal ancestors held numerous offices under the Provincial, State, and general governments, and seats in Congress, the New Jersey Legislature, and the Governor's Council. The family mansion, a large stone building, called the Castle, was fortified in the Revolutionary War. I am descended, on my mother's side, from the Scollays and Whitwells of Boston,—the former, an old Norse family (mentioned in the life of Sir Robert Strange), came over from the Orkneys in 1640; the latter, from Colnsbrook, in England, in 1735. My mother's name was Lucy Cushing Whitwell. I lived in Boston and Newton till 1848; went to Baltimore in that year; returned to Boston in 1853; went to Chicago in March, 1859; and returned to Boston in December, 1860. I have attended in Boston the Latin and High Schools, graduating at the former in 1857, and spending the next year at the latter. I received at these schools four prizes for Latin and English verses and for mathematics. I entered college in 1858. At the end of six months I left and went to Chicago, where I stayed till December, 1860. I then returned to Cambridge, and rejoined my Class in September, 1861.
