Review of “Daniel Parker: Frontier Universalist”

The Autobiography of Daniel Parker: Frontier Universalist. Edited by David Torbett. Ohio University Press, Athens: Ohio, 2021. Maps, photographs, drawings, footnotes, index. 251 pp. $39.00 Hardcover.

Those of you who were enchanted with David McCullough’s, “The Pioneers” can jump right back into the story of frontier Ohio River life with this edited version of the autobiography of “Daniel Parker, Frontier Universalist” recently released by Ohio University Press. Like McCullough’s telling of New England settlers moving through the wilderness to found Ohio’s first city, Marietta, this book follows the Parker family from Massachusetts in 1788 through stops at homesteads in Pennsylvania through Daniel’s birth in 1801 and subsequent move to the family’s 1500 acres of wilderness near Marietta. Their arrival in Ohio was delayed for seven years due to Indian Wars.

Daniel Parker wrote his memoirs in 1845. He was a keen observer of frontier life and lived as what we might call an eccentric. The family’s wanderings brought them into contact with many backwoods religious groups.

Parker gravitated to the Halcyon religious sect that focused on personal revelation while awaiting the millennial end-of-times. He became a strong convert, backwoods circuit preacher, earning his living as a cabinet maker and wooden washing machine maker. Interesting theological differences are recorded with preachers of the Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic, and Baptist persuasion. Parkers’ religious beliefs mutated into what he calls “Restorationist”, a belief that the Creator would not allow any of his creation to fall into eternal damnation.

Parker, in preaching his beliefs, develops skills that translate well into temperance and abolitionist preaching. Being a well-known circuit preacher, he could be invited to speak on temperance but switch to abolitionist sentiments even in slave holding Virginia and Kentucky. Daniel Parker dies in 1861 but not before founding Claremont School, a family legacy. Parker’s descriptive powers make journaling along with him through the pre-Civil War Ohio Valley an eye-opening excursion. Note to Westerners. See “Western Trails to Calvary” in 1949 Brand Book for a similar religious travelogue through northern New Mexico.

— Dan Shannon