June 17, 2011
General Friend Palmer’s scrapbooks
A voice from the past corrects the historical record.
June 17, 2011
A voice from the past corrects the historical record.
December 22, 2010
Festive Christmas traditions from early Detroit, as related by General Friend Palmer. Pony races, mince pies and all-night noise-making.
October 1, 2010
An elegy about old times from the General.
July 27, 2010
A poem about an early public servant.
May 12, 2010
The Napoleon of Detroit auctioneers, a schooner on wheels, laughing gas at Michigan Gardens and the lost pomp of gubernatorial election season.
April 19, 2010
Some Princes on a Dauphin-hunt visit Detroit in 1841, and buy some French books.
March 29, 2010
The remarkable story of a French immigrant, swindled into coming to America, finding himself in Detroit, starting a general store, and selling some legendary goose yokes. Also marbles.
February 18, 2010
February 5, 2010
January 28, 2010
I have always approached weekly themed blog posts, especially those involving alliteration, with trepidation. But then I found Early Days in Detroit, the memoirs of historical Detroit old guy General Friend Palmer (1820 – 1906), and I can’t think of any better way to dig through its 1000+ pages, each of them host to at least one illuminating, endearing, hilarious or otherwise just great anecdote, than to share some of the General’s memories of 19th-century Detroit every week.
March 10, 2010
A rustic log cabin, a massive Italianate marble fountain and an 18th-century bell from Spain at Senator Thomas W. Palmer’s park.
May 7, 2012
Celebrating General Friend Palmer’s birthday with “whiskey in the gentlemen’s dressing room, and champagne in the supper room.”
February 2, 2011
Silas Farmer and General Friend Palmer on early French weddings and the shadow of mortality in marriage.
January 12, 2011
From General Friend Palmer’s account of lively French winter-time dance parties. Puts a little kick in your Thursday walkabout, I hope.
February 15, 2013
How, and why, Detroit spent three years arguing over the purchase of a park.
December 28, 2012
The pioneer settler of Mt. Clemens owned a distillery, was a prisoner of the British during the War of 1812, and founded a city that loved dancing.