PARKER, WALTER M. -- Prominent among those whose memory will long be kept green, both by those who knew him personally, and could themselves appreciate his rare worth, and also by those who are always ready to honor the pioneer and path breaker to whom posterity is necessarily indebted for many blessings, was the late Walter M. Parker, a native of Stockton, N. Y., where he was born on May 7, 1844. His father, Leonard Parker, also now deceased, was a native of Hamburg, Erie County, N. Y., where he first saw the light on March 1, 1818. He married Catherine Kennedy, who was born in Montgomery County, N.Y., on October 22, 1820. Leonard Parker passed away on April 3, 1902, and his wife died twelve years before, on the fifteenth of October. They were married at Stockton, N. Y., on September 16, 1838, and came with their family to Anaheim in 1871, Mr. Parker taking up the work of a vinyardist. Still later he cultivated oranges, owning a sixty-acre ranch; whereas they had raised cattle and sheep in earlier days. They had ten children.
Walter Parker went to the public schools, and when he was old enough, became a veterinary surgeon. After coming to Orange County, he set up a regular practice, and in that scientifically interesting and humane field continued for many years, accomplishing no end of good in the relief of the dumb animal, and getting to be very well known beyond the confines even of the county. He also owned a fruit ranch of forty acres, made raisins, and built the first raisin drier in Orange County. He was best known, however, as a veterinary surgeon. Later he located at Iowa Park, Tex., where he engaged in the raising of cattle; and there he died on May 14, 1908.
He had been in the Civil War as a member of the Seventeenth Illinois Cavalry, and at Richland, now Orange, then in Los Angeles County, on June 28, 1873, he was married to Miss Barbara Kraemer, a native of St. Claire County, Ill., and the daughter of Daniel Kraemer. She has always been the center of a circle of devoted, admiring friends, and is as popular today with her stories of experience with the Indians, who were friendly, in the early days of Anaheim. One daughter, Miss Elenora A. Parker, is a teacher in the Anaheim public schools.
