Theodore Bissel Parker was born on August 20, 1889 in Roxbury, Boston, Massachussets, United States. He was the only child of Franklin Wells Parker and Sarah (Bissell) Parker. His father was a native of Roxbury, his mother of Wilmington, Vermont. Franklin Parker, listed as a clerk at the time of his son's birth, later derived his livelihood from the rental of tenements built on the site of the family homestead.
Theodore Bissell Parker attended public schools in Roxbury and Wellesley, Massachussets, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he received the degree of Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering in 1911.
Theodore Bissell Parker spent the following year in graduate study aided by an assistantship that included some teaching in M. I. T. 's civil engineering department. Meanwhile, in 1912, a few months after leaving M. I. T. , Parker had entered into his lifelong specialty of waterway and hydroelectric engineering when he joined the Utah Power and Light Company at Salt Lake City as a hydraulic engineer. He left in 1917 for wartime service with the Army Corps of Engineers, during which he commanded a company in the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. After a brief period (April 1919 - October 1920) as a hydraulic engineer with the Electric Bond and Share Company of New York, he returned to the Corps of Engineers and spent a year of study at the Army Engineering School at Fort Humphreys, Virginia. Although he remained active in the reserve and in 1933 attended the army's Command and General Staff School, Parker resumed civilian employment in 1922 and for the next eleven years found congenial activity as a hydroelectic engineer with the Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation of Boston.
The depression and the New Deal administration of President Franklin Roosevelt precipitated Theodore Parker into a career with governmental agencies that was to bring him national and eventually international prominence. His experience with the Corps of Engineers and with Stone & Webster had revealed administrative as well as engineering ability, and in 1933 he was appointed state engineer and acting director for Massachusetts of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works (later Public Works Administration). Two years later President Roosevelt named Parker chief engineer of construction of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and in 1938 chief engineer, a position which he held until 1943. The first organization of its kind in the world, TVA was an integrated multipurpose agency concerned with the balanced conservation and development of water, forest, soil, and mineral resources within the Tennessee Valley region. Parker's appointment grew out of his continuing association with the Corps of Engineers, since the corps had made the original hydrographic survey and had drawn up a preliminary plan for flood control and power generation on the Tennessee River and its tributaries which was substantially adopted by the TVA. Serving as he did throughout the period of most extensive construction, Parker played a major role in creating the program and the physical plant of the TVA, in association with the remarkably creative team that included the first two directors, Arthur E. Morgan and David E. Lilienthal, the agronomist and board member Harcourt A. Morgan, and the chief architect, Roland Anthony Wank.
For the design and construction of the controlling installations, the staff of the TVA relied extensively on the experience of the Bureau of Reclamation gained through the construction of dams and hydroelectric facilities in the West. Many innovations had to be introduced, however, to adapt the bureau's principles to navigational requirements in the Tennessee River and to balance flood-control needs against hydroelectric demand over a vast integrated system in a region of high rainfall. Parker's designing talent and administrative skills are attested by the great river-control projects completed by the TVA under his tenure Wheeler (1936), Pickwick Landing (1938), Guntersville (1939), Chickamauga (1940), Watts Bar (1942), and Fort Loudoun (1943) in the main river; Norris (1936), Hiwassee (1940), Cherokee (1942), Apalachia (1943), and Douglas (1943) among the high-head tributary structures. In addition to these, Kentucky Dam (1938 - 1944), the largest main-river facility, and Fontana Dam (1942 - 1945), the most impressive of all the TVA installations, were designed and placed under construction during his engineering administration. Parker served the government also as a member of the Water Resources Committee of the National Resources Planning Board. His published writings include contributions to the Technical Reports of TVA and a number of articles that appeared in engineering journals, chief among them "TVA River Engineering".
With the major phase of construction completed, Parker resigned from the Tennessee Valley Authority staff to accept an appointment as professor of civil engineering and chairman of the department at his alma mater, but he served less than an academic year before his early and unexpected death. On April 27 1944, at the age of fifty-four, he died of abdominal cancer at his home in Wellesley, Massachussets. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Wellesley.
Theodore Bissell Parker was a distinguished engineer, who specialized in waterways and hydroelectric engineering. He was famous for service in Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works (1933) and in the position chief engineer of construction of Tennessee Valley Authority (1935, 1938 - 1943).
Theodore Bissell Parker was a member of American Society Civil Engineers, of Society American Military Engineers, of Boston Society Civil Engineers.
On May 10, 1913, Theodore Bissell Parker married Estelle Peabody of Wellesley, Massachussets. They had two children, Franklin Peabody and Nancy.
