Profile · Muskego, Wisconsin
Luther Parker
First permanent white settler of the Town of Muskego, 1836
$5,000
Luther Parker was the New Hampshire schoolteacher and justice of the peace who became the first permanent white settler of the Town of Muskego and later sat in Wisconsin's territorial assembly. He was born in Temple, New Hampshire, on December 18, 1800, taught school, made shoes, and helped draft the 1832 constitution of the short-lived Republic of Indian Stream on the unsettled New Hampshire–Canada border. Canadians arrested him in 1835. The next year he brought his wife, Alletta, and their children to Wisconsin Territory. Giles French and Asa Parker were already in temporary quarters; in January 1837 Luther moved the family into a log cabin on the wooded south shore of the lake. County historians still call him the township's first permanent white settler. The 1845 election sent him to the territorial assembly that met in January 1846, where he served on the schools and engrossed-bills committees and chaired agriculture and manufactures. He was in the room when Waukesha County separated from Milwaukee County, and he sat on the county board in 1851. He died in Muskego on June 16, 1853, at age fifty-two. Alletta was already buried in the Durham Hill ground; the cemetery later took the Parker name. His son Charles, raised on that farm from age nine, later served two terms as Wisconsin's lieutenant governor from St. Croix County. Muskego kept the father.