In her 98 years and 2 months, Florence Palmer Butler, born Florence Louise Palmer, learned a great many skills and excelled at most. Growing up on a farm, she learned how to work the land, to plant and to harvest.
She was an expert berry-picker from an early age. In high school she included auto mechanics in her studies. In college she majored in chemistry, which became her life's work. She was an expert seamstress, using her Singer sewing machine to make clothes for her family. She was a carpenter who built, and upholstered, much of her family's furniture, from couches and beds to dining tables, coffee tables and bookcases. She designed and crafted snow sculptures, and maintained a backyard ice rink for many years. She built her own silk-screening apparatus, with which she designed and printed Christmas cards for many years.
She built home laboratories for her consulting work as a research chemist, installing plumbing, electric lines and ventilation systems.
She studied the process when the first family swimming pool was built by Mr. Mattingly in Wichita, and got Mattingly's advice when she decided to build her own pool in Wallingford, Pennsylvania — and again in Nashville, Tennessee — and again in Smithfield, Rhode Island.
In Wallingford, she turned the crawl-space under her house into a full-height basement, jack-hammering out a shelf of rock and dragging dirt out by hand, cart by cart, before pouring concrete walls below a stone wall foundation and bringing in a contractor to pour the concrete floor.
She planted vegetable gardens and green houses. As a volunteer, she built educational displays and trail infrastructure for environmental organizations, and raised seedlings in a greenhouse to be replanted under Forest Service management.
Palmer Family and Early Years:
1940s:
- Lewiston, Maine, 1943
- Univ of Maine, 1943-47
- Army Years, mid-1940s
- Elms Gang, Univ of Maine
- Winter Carnival Year 1, Univ of Maine
- Winter Carnival Year 2, Univ of Maine
- Flo on Skis
- Graduation, Univ of Maine
- Newport and Sunapee, New Hampshire, 1940s
- Flo and John's Wedding, June, 1949
- Providence, Rhode Island, 1949
1950s:
- Early 1950s
- David Michael Butler, early years
- Woonsocket, Rhode Island, circa 1957
- Amherst, Massachusetts, late 1950s
1960s:
- Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1960-61
- Robin Ann Butler, Williamstown, 1960-61
- Nancy Palmer Butler, Williamstown, 1960
- Middlebury, Vermont, 1961-66
- Sunapee, New Hampshire, 1966
- Wichita, Kansas, 1966-68
- Scarborough Beach, Rhode Island, 1967
1970s:
1980s:
- Flo and John's Immediate Family 1980s
- Flo and John's Extended Family 1980s
- Technic
- Smithfield, Rhode Island, 1980s
1990s:
- Karen Butler's Wedding in Duxbury, Massachusetts
- Block Island, Rhode Island
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1995
- Wales, Maine
- Fawnskin, California, 1998
- Flo and John
2000s:
- Portraits, circa 2000
- Wales, Maine, 2000
- Robin's Wedding, Fawnskin, California, October 2001
- Sebago Lake, Maine
- Brassua Lake, Maine, 2004
- Wales, Maine, 2008
- Biddeford Pool, Maine, October 2008
- Miscellaneous, 2000s
2010s:
- 2010
- 2011
- 2012
- 2013
- 2014 Jan-Jun
- 2014 Jul-Oct
- 2014 Nov-Dec
- 2015
- 2016
- 2017
- 2018
- 2019
- Southern California, 2010s, undated