Emma (Miller) Elwood Palmer was born September 9, 1854, in Battle Creek, Michigan. She was a cousin of Frankie Miller who traveled and sang with D. S. Warner‘s evangelistic company and became his third wife in 1893. As a young woman, Emma suffered from blindness. At the Bangor, Michigan, camp meeting in June 1883, her eyes were instantly healed in answer to prayer. Allie Fisher, a witness of the miracle, tells about Emma’s healing in her autobiography (see “Excerpts From the Autobiography of Allie Fisher“). Emma wrote the words to #36 in Songs of Victory, published by the Gospel Trumpet Company in 1885, “I Love My Savior.”
At age 45, around the year 1899 or 1900, Emma married widower Philetus Elwood who preceded her in death in 1913. On July 11, 1915, she was married to another widower, Alfred B. Palmer (a well-known pioneer minister of the Church of God), who also preceded her in death on May 19, 1921. Emma died June 24, 1948, at the age of 93 in Anderson, Indiana.