Elder John Parker
John Parker was born in September 1758, by his own application for a Revolutionary War pension, filed in Coles County, Illinois, in 1833. He gave the date as 6 September 1758. His memorial places his birth in Baltimore County, Maryland. His parents are not known. In 1833 he said that the only record of his birth was in "his father's family Bible now in his possession."
He was living in Culpeper County, Virginia, when the Revolution came. In October 1777 he volunteered in Captain Fields's company of Colonel Slaughter's regiment, in General Greene's brigade, and served twelve months. Late in 1779 he was drafted under Captain Collier of Colonel Alexander's regiment. That company marched through Winchester and on into Pennsylvania, and was stationed on Ten Mile Creek on the western frontier for another twelve months. He was in no battle. In November 1779, in Culpeper County, Virginia, he married Sarah White, the daughter of Benjamin White. Their first children were born in Culpeper, among them Daniel in April 1781. About 1785 the family moved to Elbert County, Georgia, and nine more children were born there, including Mary Jane, called Polly, in March 1785. In 1803 they moved to the Cumberland country around Nashville, Tennessee, and about 1817 to Crawford and Coles Counties in eastern Illinois.
He was a preacher of the Baptist church, of the strict predestinarian kind later called Primitive Baptists, who called their ministers Elder rather than Reverend. His son Daniel became the best-known preacher of that persuasion in the West and served in the Illinois senate. Sarah died in Illinois in 1824. John later married a widow, Sarah Pinson Duty, the mother of two of his daughters-in-law.
In 1833 his son James led a party of the family to Texas, then part of Mexico, and secured land near the headwaters of the Navasota River. His sons Silas and James built a stockade there, Fort Parker, with cabins along the walls and loopholes for rifles. John came out to join them in the fall of 1835, aged 77.
On the morning of 19 May 1836, less than a month after San Jacinto, a large party of Comanche and allied warriors attacked the fort. John was killed, with his sons Silas and Benjamin and with Samuel and Robert Frost. Two children of Silas, Cynthia Ann, nine, and John, six, were carried off, along with Rachel Plummer and her son James and Elizabeth Kellogg. Cynthia Ann Parker lived among the Comanche for nearly twenty-five years. John Parker's name is on the monument at the Fort Parker Memorial Park near Groesbeck.
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Cite: Heirology, "Elder John Parker (1758-1836)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/elder-john-parker-1758-1836-61a023.