Samuel Parker (c.1788-1871) may have been the wealthiest horn merchant in Sheffield.  He was listed in a directory (1822) in Fargate as a bone and horn merchant.  He also made ‘fancy horn boxes’.  Later the address was Porter Street.  By the end of the 1830s, Samuel had been joined by his son, William, and his firm also occupied a stretch of the canal basin on Sussex Street, known as Parker’s Wharf.  Wilmot Taylor (1927)¹ has described Parker’s canal-side piles of ox, cow, buffalo, and deer horn, which he imported from overseas or bought at the London auctions.  Taylor added that it would not be ‘much exaggeration to say that at this time he supplied horns generally for the entire demand of the trade’.  Parker lived at Broomgrove House, Broomgrove Road.  When he died there on 30 December 1871, aged 83, he left under £70,000.  He was buried in the General Cemetery, alongside the remains of his wife, Mary, who had died in 1854, aged 66.   His son, William, continued as a horn merchant and was living in Broomgrove House at the time of the Census (1881), with his wife, Lucinda (28 years his junior).   By the next Census, William had retired and was living in Torquay, with Lucinda and a daughter, Edith Mary.  He also acquired Whittington Hall, Derbyshire.  William Parker JP died on 7 July 1893, aged 77, leaving £57,776.  His daughter later married Evelyn Seymour, 17th Duke of Somerset.

^1. Taylor, Wilmot, The Sheffield Horn Industry (Sheffield, 1927)