page_title: Charles Merrill (businessman)
section_title: Memorials
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Merrill (businessman) / Memorials
caption_attribution_description: English: Merrill Humane Fountain, in front of the old Detroit Opera House. Between 1901 and 1906 in Detroit, Michigan.
context_page_description: Charles Merrill was an American entrepreneur who owned mercantile, construction, real estate, and lumber companies in Maine, Virginia, and Michigan.
context_section_description: His daughter, Elizabeth Palmer, had a fountain designed by the architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings and built in his honor in 1904 at a cost of US$1,000,000 (equivalent to $28,455,556 in 2019). The Merrill Humane Fountain was originally located in front of the old Detroit Opera House in Campus Martius Park. As automobile traffic increased in downtown Detroit, the city’s elders decided to move the fountain to the Merrill Plaissance, at the far southern boundary of Palmer Park, in 1926.
  A set of windows designed by John La Farge, now in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, were memorial windows dedicated to three trustees of the First Unitarian Church of Detroit. The central grouping of windows was dedicated to Charles Merrill and features two lancets entitled "Faith" (center left) and "Hope" (center right). The inscription beneath "Hope" comes from Psalm 119, reading "The entrance of thy words giveth light." The windows were created in 1899 when the First Unitarian Church of Detroit built the congregation's second site. Eventually, the building was sold to the Church of Christ and the windows were removed when the widening of Woodward Avenue was planned in 1936, necessitating a modification and move of the church building. The windows were never reinstalled and ultimately all but one of the windows were donated to the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1959 by the Unitarian Church Trust. The DIA windows were restored between 1988 and 1991 by Mary Clerkin Higgins and were dedicated in April 1991.
caption: Merrill Humane Fountain, in front of the old Detroit Opera House, taken between 1901 and 1906
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