Loftin’s Ferry on Pitts Avenue, later called Parker, stood on the Military Road from Apalachicola through St. Joseph to Marianna and beyond, the road built from 1836 to 1838 under Major J.D. Graham that served as the only land link to the City of St. Joseph and carried travelers, mail, and commerce from the north. In 1838, dignitaries traveling to Florida’s first constitutional convention went by stage along this road. The site was first known as Reviere’s Bluff after early settler Henry L. Reviere, and by 1835 it had become a ferry crossing and accommodation stop operated by William M. Loftin, a former sheriff and tax collector of Jackson County who in 1836 became a surveyor and revenue inspector for the Port of St. Andrews. Around that time, Loftin, Reviere, and Joseph M. White, Florida’s first territorial delegate to Congress from 1825 to 1837, developed the community and named it Austerlitz after the French village where Reviere’s family lived. In 1886, the name Parker was adopted to honor the two separate families of Peter Ferdinand Parker and William Henry Parker.