Pgs 735-36

WILLIAM PARKER, is one of the solid and prosperous pioneer settlers of Belle Plaine township, Shawano county, whose advent, there preceded the exodus of the wild animals of the forest, bears, wolves, panthers, deer and numberless others, whom he found more reluctant than even the Red man to surrender their time-honored  prerogatives and rights to the advance-guard of civilization.
     
Mr. Parker is a native of Maine, born November 8, 1838, in Burnham, Waldo county, a son of Samuel and Mary Jane (Cole) Parker, both also natives of  the "Pine Tree State", born, the  father on April 10, 1805, the mother in 1815. Grandfather Samuel Parker first saw the light in 1770, and lived to the great age of ninety-five years. He reared a family of seven children, named, respectively: Samuel, Harriet,  William, Rachel, Sophia, Constant, and Welcomotis. Of these, Samuel, father of our subject, married Jane Cole, and by her had seven children: Abigail A. is the wife of John W. Spencer, a miner of Yankee Hill, Cal., and has a family of three children, Dora, Samuel and Charles Franklin; William; Harriet, Mrs. Sodwa L. Rouse, of Belle Plaine; Louis F., a farmer of Iowa; Alfred W., a lumberman of Chippewa Falls, Wis.; George M., a farmer in Chippewa Falls, with whom the father lives, and Everett S., a farmer and lumberman, of Chippewa Falls. In 1856 the family moved west to Ohio, locating first at Norwalk, the father working some twelve months for a farmer named John Bezley, of that city, but whose farm was at Monroeville, a few miles west from there. They then, in 1857, came to Wisconsin, settling in Belle Plaine township, Shawano county, where the father bought 160 acres of wild land in Section 2O, from which, assisted by his sons, he lumbered the pine, and made a clearing for a homestead. They brought five horses with them from Ohio, the journey, which was made entirely with wagons, occupying nineteen days, and the mother walked all the way from New London, in Waupaca county.  There was no road of any kind anywhere near their destination, and everything was in a most primitive state, but, by assiduous toil and characteristic perseverance, the family succeeded, in course of time, in hewing out a comfortable home. Here the mother, died May 21, 1881, at the age of sixty-six years, the father, now aged ninety years, is passing his declining days at the home of his son George, in Chippewa Falls, Wis.  He is a lifelong, stanch Democrat.
     
William Parker, the eldest son, and the subject proper of this sketch, received fairly liberal common-school education in the East, and, as will be seen, was nineteen years old when he accompanied his parents to Wisconsin. With them he remained until his marriage, when he bought one hundred acres of land, his present fine farm in Section 17, Belle Plaine township, whereon he erected a comfortable log house, 14 x 16 feet in size, covered with boards. Here he at once commenced clearing the land of the timber and underbrush, and converting the primeval forest into fertile fields of grain and pasture, all the assistance he and his equally industrious wife had being an ox-team. Today they still own the original hundred acres, one-half of which is cleared, and, in addition to agriculture, Mr. Parker also engages in lumbering. 
     
On June 1, 1861, our subject was united in marriage with Miss Elizabeth A. N. Sanders, who was born at Halifax, Mass., a daughter of William H. and Sarah Maria (Burrington) Sanders, prominent and well-to-do farming people of Belle Plaine township, Shawano county. To this union have been born five children, as follows: Mary Jane, who became the wife of Augustus Perry and died leaving one child, Bessie; Alfred W., in Belle Plaine, who is married; Lettie R., wife of Fred Brodhagen, a farmer of Belle Plaine; Inez Dora, wife of Charles Seidletz, a farmer and day laborer of Shawano, Wis.; and Warren .P., at home. In his political preferences Mr. Parker is like his father before him, a stanch Democrat. He and Mrs. Parker have been hard workers in their pioneer lives, and well merit their present enviable condition of quiet comfort and comparative ease.