About Dr. Moses Greeley Parker

Moses Greeley Parker was born in Dracut in 1842. He became a physician and served as a surgeon during the Civil War.

While in the Army, he planned and oversaw construction of the largest hospital in the world in Virginia. Upon returning to civilian life, Dr. Parker joined the medical and surgical staff at St. John’s Hospital as a practicing ophthalmologist.

In 1876, Dr. Parker attended a lecture here in Lowell presented by a young inventor and teacher of the deaf in Boston by the name of Alexander Graham Bell.  During that lecture, Alexander demonstrated his new invention, the telephone. Dr. Parker was intrigued and became a major investor in Bell Telephone.

During a measles epidemic, Dr. Parker realized that if the town’s telephone operator fell ill, a substitute would have difficulty making accurate connections since it was done by name only. So he came up with the idea of adding telephone numbers.

Upon his death in 1917, Dr. Parker established a trust to fund free lectures for the residents of Greater Lowell. Over 100 years later, we’re still going strong.