The University Libraries’ special collections department recently opened for research the letters of Edward William Parker, a leading Little Rock banker and Civil War veteran. This collection of correspondence dates from 1817 through 1908 and contains letters between Parker, his father Nathan B. Parker, his mother Elizabeth Langford Parker, his brother Henry D. Parker, his first wife Annie Reynolds Parker, and his daughter Mary Elizabeth Reid. The letters reveal information about the Parker family, their personal experiences during the Civil War, their involvement with Shakerism, and Parker’s duties as a riverboat clerk.

Edward Parker lived for many years in a house on the corner of Second and Broadway in Little Rock, where he kept a menagerie of animals, including peacocks, larks, a Mynah bird, an alligator, a turtle, a chameleon, dogs and snakes. Parker, a leader in the movement to establish a charity hospital in Little Rock, was also interested in spiritualism. He amassed a book collection on mysticism, Asian beliefs and Hinduism, which were donated to the Manly P. Hall Theological Library in Los Angeles after his death.

Parker was born in Galveston, Texas, on Jan. 8, 1842. His family lived in Galveston while his father served as the Weights, Master Measurer, Inspector and Gauger for the city until the family moved to New Orleans in 1849. Parker graduated from high school in 1854, and that same year his father, who was given to the New Hampshire Shakers when he was a young child, relocated his family to the Shaker community in Pleasant Hill, Ky.

In 1856 Parker went to live and work for his mother’s cousin Edward Morton, who owned a large plantation at Cummins, Ark. In 1857 Parker began work as a riverboat clerk for planters and carrying Arkansas mail packets for the Arkansas government. For five years he worked on at least six boats, including the Arkansas, Quapaw,Irene,Red Wing, South Bend, andFrederick Notrebe.

In January 1862 Parker married Annie Reynolds, and they had three children: Chauncey, Richard, and Mary Elizabeth. Mary Elizabeth was the only child to survive to adulthood. During the Civil War, Parker served as a clerk in the Confederate Quarter Master Corps, working out of Arkansas’ confederate state capital in Washington, Ark. He reached the rank of captain. In addition to his wartime military duties, Parker cared for his brother, Henry, who was wounded at the Battle of Shiloh on April 7, 1862.

After the Civil War, Parker worked for S.H. Tucker’s Exchange Banking & Collecting Office in Little Rock as a cashier. In 1872 he opened a banking and brokerage business named Edward W. Parker & Co. and continued business under that name until 1877 when he became a partner with William Booker Worthen in the firm Parker & Worthen: Bankers, Brokers, and Real Estate Agents. After several years of business success, the partnership was dissolved in 1888 when Worthen purchased Parker's interest in the business for $24,000. Subsequently Parker operated several other banking and brokerage establishments in Little Rock, including E.W. Parker & Co., Parker & Cates, Parker, Ewing & Co. and Parker, Reid & Co.

In an 1857 letter to his mother describing his early adventures in Arkansas, Parker reported, “There was a murder at the [Arkansas] Post the other day. George Oakley was stabbed right through the heart, and after he had lain a little while on his back, he was taken out and thrown in the weeds, and it is a wonder the hogs did not get at and eat him. There was a man shot at Napoleon, but not killed, no cause known, and the one who shot him got away. Don’t know who killed Oakley, no arrests made, there were seven persons in the room, the candle was blown out and the deed done.”

In 1861 Parker wrote his cousin Elvira about the tensions leading to the Civil War. “I am for immediate secession,” he said. “It may ruin me pecuniarily—for the fifteen slave states will be united to form a glorious confederacy—but what I most fear is [financial disaster] at present and then the still more terrible results of civil war between, as it were, brothers – this cannot last long – then there will be peace.”

In 1902 Parker retired to Boston, Mass., leaving the operation of his bank to his son-in-law and brother. Parker died May 28, 1908, in Brookline, Mass., where he was buried.