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Fred Parker — "The Hermit of Quidnet" by Edouard A. Stackpole ALTHOUGH HE HAS been dead for more than a century, the man who was familiarly known as "The Hermit of Quidnet," Frederick F. Parker, is still recalled by writers who like to review unusual figures of the past. We know some of the stories of those other individuals who chose to segregate themselves from society and exist in a solitary way, but we know as little now as we did in 1880 of Fred Parker who established himself at his hermitage in the hamlet of Quidnet on the eastern shore of Nantucket. A few facts remain concerning his early life in Nantucket. As a young man he came here to live with relatives. In the prosperous years of our whaling prosperity in the 19th century, he became an apprentice to a carpenter and later opened his own shop on South Water Street. He met a Nantucket girl, became engaged and they were married when he was 29 years old and she was seventeen. His shop was burned by the Great Fire of 1846, and it is not known that he had it rebuilt, but pro bably resumed his trade as a carpenter. Little is known about the Parkers during the next decade, but it has been recorded that the couple separated just before the outbreak of the Civil War. At this time he made the decision to take up residence at Quidnet, where he built a small, one-room dwelling, under the brow of the hillside sloping gently to the pond, close to where the sand hills served as wind-breaks against the northeasterly gales. Here he lived the rest of his life, a solitary individual, with only a few friends or rather acquaintances. There were a number of families living at Quidnet and Peedee, on the other side of the pond, at this time, and Parker may have been hired to do some carpenter work for them, but little is known. When Nantucket emerged from the Civil War era, and the Islanders were discovering the new economy known as the "summer business", it became a custom for the visitors to explore the Island, riding behind a pair of horses to 'Sconset, Madaket, Quaise, Polpis and Quidnet. The Nantucketers' build-up of 'Sconset as a favored summer place was a feature of this period. The town's farm at Quaise was undergoing changes, after the old Asylum was moved into town. At Quidnet the Hermit, Fred Parker, was an object of much curiosity and also a subject for journalistic essays.
