Taken with permission from the Wichita County Heritage Society June 2007 Riverside Cemetery Tour book. If you would like more information please contact www.wichita-heritage.org.
This post is in conjunction with yesterday’s post provided by the Holcomb family…
Allen Parmer, born in Independence, Missouri, had a common school education and, at the age of 15, joined the William C Quantrill led Confederate Guerrilla Force. He remained with Quantrill’s guerrillas through the Civil War. Quantrill’s guerrillas included the famous Frank and Jesse James, and the Younger brothers. He was wounded five times during the war and surrendered to Federal authorities on July 26, 1865, at Bardstown, Kentucky. After the war he pursued additional education in St. Louis, Missouri from 1867-68 at the Bryant and Stratton Business College.
On November 24, 1870, he married Susan James, the sister of his previous friends, the outlaw James brothers. They settled in Grayson County, Texas where he established himself as stock raiser and farmer and she taught school in Sherman. By 1873 he moved his family to Gilbert Creek in Clay County. Jeff Waggoner remembered meeting Jesse and Frank James at the Parmer home in 1879. That same year a Glendale, Missouri train was robbed and Federal authorities arrested Allen Parmer on charges of being an accomplice in the robbery. He was incarcerated in Kansas City, Missouri, but the evidence did not exist to hold him. He was eventually released and all charges were dropped. He returned to his family in Clay County. Frank James visited North Texas on a regular basis and stayed with the Parmers in the summer of 1881 while hiding from the law.
Mr. Parmer moved his family to Wichita Falls in the fall of 1882. He operated a farm south of town and hauled dirt and freight for construction of the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway through Wichita Falls. In 1883 he was manager of two organizations: the T-Fork Cattle Company and the Wichita Land and Cattle Company of Wichita and Archer Counties. In 1889 he had enough of management and returned to farming 700 acres in southern Wichita Falls. On March 3, 1889, Susan died in childbirth at the age of 39. Allen was left to care for their four children. He remarried on December 27, 1892 to Sarah Katherine “Kitty” Ogden, of Lafayette County, Missouri. They continued farming in Wichita Falls and the Archer County area until the early 1900s. He left Wichita County in 1905 and reentered railroad construction in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Mississippi. In 1920 he retired after an active life as a cattleman, farmer, and railroad builder and moved with his wife to Alpine, Texas. During a visit to Claude Miller at 1300 Grant Street in Wichita Falls in October 1927 he had a heart attack and died at the age of eighty. He was buried next to his first wife, Susan, in Wichita Falls.