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The Blue Book of Iowa Women A History of Contemporary Women

Compiled by Winona Evans Reeves, 1914.

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Mrs. L. F. Parker

Sarah Condace Pearse Parker, who was for seventeen years a teacher in the State University of Iowa, was born in Sudbury, Vt., Feby. 21, 1828.  She was educated in Oberlin, Ohio, and came to Grinnell, Iowa, in 1856.  She served as Lady Principal of the State University from 1870 to 1887, when she resigned and returned to Grinnell, where she died, June 5, 1900, survived by her husband, L. F. Parker, and one daughter, Hrs. Harriet P. Campbell, of Denver, Colo.  During Prof. Parker's residence in Iowa City their home was a veritable haven for the discouraged students.  She was fond of society and her home was famed for its hospitality.  She was versed in all house-wifely arts, was a musician and a public speaker of ability.  She was fond of all beautiful things but content to live in her own beautiful thoughts and deeds that her beneficence might reach a wider circle.  She was an unusual teacher, --- dignified and firm, but tender and kind and true to every pupil under her care;  a conscientious, painstaking teacher, the influence and power of whose presence in the class-room continues still in the lives of those privileged to be under her instruction, an incentive to thoroughness and accuracy.  She was a wise counselor, a noble woman --- fit model in every respect for the young women under her care.  "My girls," she continued to call them to the day of her death, and they reverence and treasure her memory and the memory of those college days --- so largely shaped by her --- as a precious legacy.  Hundreds of these "girls" in our own and in distant lands, rise up and call her blessed.

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