Josiah Lamberson Parrish

Josiah Parrish was born in Onondaga County, New York, to Sally Parrish (née Lamberson) and Benjamin Parrish on January 14, 1806. His mother was of Dutch and Puritan heritage born in New Jersey, with his father of English lineage born in 1777 in Connecticut. Josiah was the oldest of ten children in the family. In 1839, the trained blacksmith volunteered to join Jason Lee's mission in the Willamette Valley. Parrish and around 50 others sailed on the ship Lausanne around Cape Horn in South America to the Columbia River and on to Oregon City in what has been called the Great Reinforcement of the Methodist Mission. They set sail on October 9, 1839, from New York City. ==Missionary==

Parrish and the others arrived in Oregon in May 1840. In California the vessel was sold in order to purchase cattle to be driven overland to the Willamette Valley. On February 1, 1842, Parrish was selected as a trustee to the new Oregon Institute, a school established to teach the children of the missionaries that later became Willamette University. Also in 1842, Parrish moved to the Clatsop Plains and took over the Clatsop Mission from Joseph H. Frost. In 1844, when the Methodist Mission was dissolved by George Gary, Parrish purchased the Clatsop Plains mission. From 1849 until 1854 he worked as an Indian agent in the now Oregon Territory. As a rancher he was the first breeder in Oregon of pure-breed sheep, and had brought the first white clover seed to Oregon when he migrated aboard the Lausanne. ==Later life==

Parrish became involved in a land dispute involving the authority of the laws from the Provisional Government with Daniel H. Lownsdale. Parrish took the matter to court in a case that made its way through the Oregon Supreme Court and to the United States Supreme Court in Lownsdale v. Parrish, 62 U.S. 290 (1858). In 1868, Parrish drove the first spike in Portland, Oregon, for the Oregon and California Railroad. Later that year his wife Elizabeth died, with Josiah remarrying in 1870 to Jane (Jennie) Lichtenthaler Pickett. ==See also==