Early Life
Parke was born in Coatesville, Chester County, Pennsylvania, to Francis G. and Sarah Parke. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1849 and was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. As an engineer, he determined the boundary lines between Iowa and the Little Colorado River, surveyed routes for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, and was the chief surveyor of the party charged with the delineation of the boundary of the northwest United States and British North America, 1857–1861.
Read more about this topic: John Parke
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)