an American lawyer, jurist, general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and a pioneer to the Ohio Country. Parsons was described as "Soldier, scholar, judge, one of the strongest arms on which Washington leaned, who first suggested the Continental Congress, from the story of whose life could almost be written the history of the Northern War" by Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts Parsons was born in Lyme, Connecticut, the son of Jonathan Parsons and Phoebe (Griswold) Parsons. At the age of nine, his family moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where his father, an ardent supporter of the First Great Awakening, took charge of the town's new Presbyterian congregation.
