word "scrod," which is not a kind of fish, but a term for the freshest, finest, and youngest white fish of the day. Jacques Offenbach stayed at the hotel during an 1876 tour of the U.S., and, inspired by the rolls, sang a tune to friends as a joke. He would later use it as a theme in his opera, The Tales of Hoffmann. On May 31, 1884, when founder Harvey Parker died at the age of 79, he was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, the “permanent home” of many of Boston’s most prestigious people. The ambitious Maine farm boy who arrived in Boston almost penniless in 1825, died with a net worth of $1,272,546.94. Parker’s will granted $100,000 to Boston’s new Museum of Fine Arts, and provided the foundation for its Print Department. The hotel passed to Parker's partners, Edward O. Punchard and Joseph H. Beckman until 1891, when Joseph Reed Whipple assumed control of the Parker House. To provide his Boston diners with the freshest and finest food products available, Whipple established his own 2,500-acre dairy farm in New Boston, New Hampshire. Valley View Farm was divided into Dairy, Piggery, and Hennery Departments, employing some ninety people. In order to make daily deliveries to Boston, Whipple helped build a railroad depot in New Boston and connected it to existing main lines with a spur track later leased to the Boston & Maine Railroad. 20th century The original Parker House building and later architectural additions were demolished in the mid 1920s, and replaced in 1927 with a sleek, modern building, essentially the one that stands there today. One wing of the nineteenth century hotel remained open until the new building was completed in 1927, enabling the hotel to lay claim to being "America's oldest operating hotel". The hotel was seized by its creditors during the Great Depression and sold by the bank to Glenwood Sherrard in 1933. James Michael Curley, the charismatic, Irish-American "Mayor of the Poor" who dominated Boston politics for the first half of the twentieth century, was a constant presence at the Parker House, in part because Old City Hall stood directly across from the hotel on School Street. The Omni Parker House bar, The Last Hurrah, was named for Edwin O'Connor's 1956 novel of the same name, a thinly disguised chronicling of Mayor Curley’s colorful life. John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for Congress at