11/19/2022
History/Fun Facts about Palmer Park: In 1885, U.S. Senator Thomas Witherell Palmer had the architecture firm of Mason & Rice design a rustic log cabin-style summer house on land which now comprises part of Palmer Park. The design was a gift for his wife, Lizzie Merrill Palmer, who was growing weary of the traffic, noise and crowds of the city. She wanted a retreat where she could live as people had in the early days: simply, peacefully, and on plenty of land. Construction on the cabin was complete in 1887. It sits near the bank of Lake Frances. The Palmer Log Cabin was originally known as “Font Hill Log House.”[18][19]
The Palmers were not ostentatious people, who enjoyed spending their summers at the log cabin and sharing it with their neighbors as well as friends and acquaintances from all over the nation. In 1911, a writer for a horse-breeding gazette recalled that “there was no formality” at Log Cabin feasts; “Dinner,” he wrote, “was announced with an old tin horn.” Whenever a fellow Senator visited, Palmer asked him to plant a tree, from which he hung a brass plaque engraved with his name.
For a period, the Log Cabin was a major tourist attraction, and in the summer visitors from all over the world thronged in for a look. It stayed open until 1979, when the city gave its artifacts to the Detroit Historical Society for safekeeping and closed the Log Cabin to the public. It served as a community center during the 1960s before it closed due to a lack of city funding. On June 24, 2012, the group People for Palmer Park partnered with the City of Detroit to open the cabin to the public for only the second time since 1979, as part of a fundraiser to restore the building's roof, On June 24, 2016, the City of Detroit announced the start of a $400,000 restoration of Palmer Park's historic Log Cabin.
