Dr. Marcus Palmer: A Resident's Mission with the Cherokees

by Jeffrey Bingham Mead
Greenwich Time. Looking Back: September 29, 1996

"The calls of missions is the cause of God," according to the weekly periodical called The Religious Intelligencer of July 1834, "and it behooves us to go forward confident in His protection and faithful to his interest."

One young man from Greenwich, Dr. Marcus Palmer, answered this call and became the town's first missionary.

Palmer was born in Greenwich on April 24, 1795. At the age of 25, he departed New York City on April 20, 1820. He was sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to teach and attend to the medical needs of the Osages and Cherokees. Ten years later in 1830, he was ordained a Congregational minister while stationed with the Arkansas Cherokees.

On Aug. 24, 1824, Palmer married Clarissa Johnson, a native of Colchester. After her death on Sept. 8, 1835 in Granville, Ohio, Palmer married again, this time to Clarissa's younger sister, Jerusha, on Feb. 7, 1836. She had joined them previously as an assistant.

A number of letters penned by Palmer were published in The Missionary Herald, a monthly news magazine published by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions.

In 1829, he reflected on his teaching duties at Mullberry Creek, Georgia, among the Cherokees.

"We found the people as ready to receive instruction as we expect," he wrote. "At first, the school consisted of about 15 scholars, all of whom belonged to the immediate neighborhood."

His letter also alluded to the expulsion of the Cherokees to the west.

"… the news came of the treaty at Washington, by which the country was exchange for one further to the west. Now our hopes were dashed… The people are now beginning to make preparation for removing, and it is likely a great portion of them will go this early fall."

Cherokee lands in 1830. 

In the west, Palmer and his wife helped organize a Cherokee Temperance Society and a newspaper. Missionaries were actively engaged in creating written languages where none existed before. Instruction was carried out in both English and Cherokee languages. Revivals of religion followed as did the creation by Mrs. Palmer of a woman's society for promoting temperance and the establishment of a library.

By 1837, all was going well despite the difficulties involved in the mass migration, including the deaths of many. The Missionary Herald reported the printing of Cherokee language books.

Palmer and his second wife were released from the mission in 1840 and went on to live in White Plains, New York.

Jeffrey Bingham Mead is a free-lance writer and direct descendant of one of the town's founding families. He grew up in backcountry Greenwich.