American bookbinder and naturalist from Philadelphia. Charles F. Parker was interested in shells, plants and insects and worked in a curatorial capacity at the museum of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. His mother died when he was just an infant and Parker soon entered the family profession, being apprenticed to a bookbinder. Leaving Philadelphia at the age of 22 he moved to Boston and continued on in the same line of work. On marrying Martha Kellom in 1851 he moved to Leominster and opened a book shop, although unfortunately it was not particularly successful. Abandoning this enterprise he returned to the Philadelphia area but settled just across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey, and he remained there for the rest of his life. On the death of his father in 1835 Parker took over the family bookbinding business and he ran it successfully alongside his stepmother.

Extremely hardworking in his professional life, Parker also devoted much of his time to the study of natural history. Initially he focused his attention on the fields of conchology and entomology, but joining the Entomological Society of Philadelphia brought him into contact with several botanists and he began to collect plant specimens. Parker was particularly interested in the introduced plants brought up the Delaware to the ports of Philadelphia and Camden in ballast water. Collecting extensively in New Jersey, particularly in the pine barrens and swamps, his name appears often in Nathaniel L. Britton's Catalogue of plants found in New Jersey (1889).

After his election to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, Parker began to undertake the massive task of looking after and organising the conchological collections of the Academy's museum. Working entirely voluntarily, he had just finished arranging the specimens systematically when the museum was set to move location. At this time he gave up a part of his book business and was elected a curator at the museum, given a modest salary and employed to move the specimens to the new facility. At the time of his death from paralysis of the brain, several thousand of Parker's plant specimens were acquired by his close friend Isaac Martindale and incorporated into his vast collection now housed at the National Arboretum.

Sources:
J.W. Harshberger, 1899, The Botanists of Philadelphia: 229-231
I.C. Martindale, 1883, "Obituary Notice of Charles F. Parker", Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philidelphia, 35: 260-265
F.G. Meyer and S. Elsasser, 1973, "The 19th century herbarium of Isaac C. Martindale", Taxon, 22(4): 375-404.