PARKER, ISAAC NEWTON (1837-1910)

PARKER, ISAAC NEWTON, Methodist minister, Derby mission, 1881-84; b. Wilmot, Annapolis Co., N.S., 1837, s/o James Parker and Mary Slocomb; m. 1st, 1866, Margaret MacMillan, d/o Miles MacMillan and Sarah Catherine Pond, and 2nd, 1885, Isadora Blanche Williams, of Gagetown, N.B.; d. Saint John, 8 Nov 1910.

Isaac N. Parker studied for the Methodist ministry at Mount Allison College and served a three-year probationary term in Dalhousie, N.B., prior to his ordination in 1866. Between that date and 1907, when he retired, he occupied a large number of pulpits in rural and small town New Brunswick and was said to have played a part in the erection of ten churches.

Parker was stationed at Bathurst before he was assigned to the Derby mission, and his first wife died there in the fall of 1880. In 1881 he and his children moved into a spacious new parsonage which had been erected at Derby (Millerton) the previous summer. He remained for the usual three years and then went to Petitcodiac. His "genial, sunny disposition" made him a favorite everywhere he served, and he became one of the best-known ministers of the Methodist church in the province.

When they were married in 1885, Parker's second wife, I. Blanche Williams, was nineteen years old and he was forty-eight. There were three children born of this marriage, as there had been of the first one. He died of a sudden illness in Saint John while he and his wife were enroute from Sussex to Boston to make their home with his only son. His grave is in Chatham with that of his first wife, Margaret MacMillan.