The Palmers spent summer after summer there and invited friends and diplomats for dinner parties. (They also stored a birch bark canoe up there – no frontier homestead would be complete without one.) From the rafters hung bundles of herbs, dried fruit, and corn. In the parlor they kept a cradle from 1822 that had rocked Thomas Palmer and each of his 8 brothers and sisters to sleep at some point. The cabin's furniture had supported generations of Palmers and Witherells both Lizzie and Thomas's childhood highchairs had a place in the dining room, and Judge Witherell had brought his hand-made dining room chairs from Vermont in 1808. Family portraits and paintings of presidents hung on the walls. Walker piano leather buckets from the days of Detroit's ''bucket brigade'' fire department spinning wheels a Mexican saddle and spurs a stuffed blue heron an elk's head and various swords, snow-shoes and Indian bows and arrows. Other highlights included James Witherell's mahogany grandfather clock, built in 1787 a century-old Gelt V. The Palmers filled the Cabin with family heirlooms, souvenirs from Palmer's stint as Ambassador to Spain, and relics that evoked Michigan's pioneer days. The walls were plastered, the floor laid with white maple and walnut planks, and the grand staircase carved from oak. Inside, red brick fireplaces warm the dining room on the north end and the parlor on the south end. Two chimneys rise from each end of the house. The two-story Log Cabin is built from oak logs (with the bark still on!) on a brick foundation. "On the outside, the Log Cabin looks like a substantial, genuine log house," Crocket McElroy wrote in "Souvenir History of Palmer Park." "On the inside it comes pretty near being a good modern house." (Rice later married the Palmer's adopted daughter Grace.) Mason and Zachariah Rice, was completed in 1887. The Cabin, designed by upstart architecture partners George D. In 1885, Thomas Palmer gave his wife a present: plans for a rustic log cabin, just like they used to see in the old days, built to her specifications, suitable for summering and entertaining. He kept an orchard and raised herds of cattle and Percheron horses. He had inherited it from his grandfather James Witherell, a Supreme Court judge of the Michigan Territory, and had ''played with it'' since the 1860s, growing his holdings and farming the land. Palmer, had plenty of land – a few hundred acres of it along Woodward Avenue in what was then considered the country. It just so happened that her husband, Sen. She longed for a retreat, a place where she could live as people had in the early days: simply, peacefully and on plenty of land. Lizzie Merrill Palmer was growing weary of the traffic, noise and crowds of the city.
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