Thomas S. Parker

Rachel Parker lived what the plaque gives one line. Born in Illinois in 1822, she married Tom Parker in 1843 and came to Corpus Christi in early 1845. When he won the beef contract for Taylor's army, she went with the troops to Camargo and stayed until the war ended. Her obituary says he made the flag carried at Buena Vista. She stayed in town through the Civil War while he worked in Mexico, lost a son to yellow fever in 1867, raised twelve children and died in 1906.

What the plaque says

Thomas S. Parker Born in Philadelphia in 1817, Thomas S. Parker came to Texas at the age of twenty. In 1839 he and his parents William W. and Hannah Parker were awarded large land grants in the vicinity of present-day Corpus Christi; they used the land to raise cattle. About 1845 Parker joined forces with his friend Henry L. Kinney, who had established a trading post in this vicinity and also commanded a Texas Ranger unit. When General Zachary Taylor's U.S. Army set up came near the trading post in August 1845, Kinney was named the army's quartermaster, and Thomas Parker was awarded the contract to supply beef for the soldiers. It was from this army post that the town of Corpus Christi grew. As an established resident of the area, "Col. Tom" Parker, as he was known, was appointed the first Nueces County Sheriff after Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845. He later served as a Texas Ranger and as a soldier in the Confederate army. After the end of the Civil War, Parker returned to Corpus Christi, where he became City Marshal in 1873 and died in 1886. Thomas Parker's contributions in commercial activity and law enforcement were vital to the early growth of Corpus Christi. He and his wife Rachel are buried at this site. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.6 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.8 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.0 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.2 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• James Downing — steps away
• William DeRyee — steps away
• Louis de Planque — steps away
• Anna Moore Schwein — steps away