Jonathan Parker

(Between 1726 and 1728 – August 1801) 

As a farmer, Boston Tea Party Participant Jonathan Parker spent most of his life in and around the town of Roxbury, just south of Boston, along the main road. 

Following the Boston Tea Party, Parker and a few other participants went to the home of Samuel “Tanner” Heath to confront him for failing to appear to dump tea. Their attempt to enter the home rather aggressively was thwarted when Mrs. Heath offered the group refreshments. 

According to historian Francis S. Drake in his 1884 book Tea Leaves, Parker was involved in smuggling artillery out of Boston during the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. Parker managed to slip two of four cannons past British lines on Boston Neck, buried beneath a “load of stable manure.” They were “deposited…in Muddy Pond Woods. The next day, a company of Redcoats were at neighbouring Jamaica Plain, searching for the missing cannon. …Of these four historic guns, two were taken at Bunker Hill by the enemy, the other two, the “Hancock” and “Adams”, served at the Roxbury lines and elsewhere and were once in the chamber at the top of Bunker’s Hill Monument.” 

Jonathan Parker died in Jay, Maine, in August 1801 and is buried in Jay Hill Cemetery.