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11/30/2016 07:30 AMOn Sunday, Dec. 11, at 1 p.m., Henry Griggs will put on his Colonial-clergyman outfit and read The Night Before Christmas to local children and their families at the Deacon John Grave House, the 1685 house museum near the Madison Green. The kids will also bake gingerbread in the hearth and make orange-and-clove pomanders.
Most of us would consider that an afternoon well spent, but Henry, who is a member of the board of the Deacon John Grave Foundation, seems to feel a twinge of guilt.
“It’s a little anachronistic,” he says, “in that in New England, they didn’t celebrate Christmas until after the Civil War.
“In fact,” he adds, “in the early days in the New Haven Colony, it was a punishable offense.”
Henry also admits that the poem he will read was written in the 19th century, but he hopes that the combination of history and fun will get some of the kids interested in the past.
“You just have to bend a little,” he says.
In his various roles—he’s also a member of the boards of the E.C. Scranton Memorial Library, the Charlotte L. Evarts Memorial Archives, and the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, and was recently appointed municipal historian for the Town of Madison—Henry strives to help Madison appreciate and preserve its past.
Henry is well versed in the arcana of nonprofit work. He can explain the restrictions on development that are involved in being a landmarked building as opposed to being part of a historic district and can describe the various tax advantages involved in both.
Henry began helping out at the Grave House in 2011, after reading a notice in The Source that said the foundation was looking for new members.
“I started by just doing dishes after a hearth dinner,” he says.
Once he was on the board—he eventually served as vice-president and president—Henry drew on his experience working at a think tank and a nonprofit in Washington, D.C.
He says, “I indicated that, you know, you could probably be raising money though grant requests here, if you only knew where to go. They said, ‘Who’s going to do it?’ and I said, ‘I’ll do it.’”
By reaching out to various groups—he particularly credits the 1772 Foundation, the Summer Hill Foundation, and the Bauer Charitable Trust—Henry has helped fund maintenance and improvements at the Grave House. He’s comfortable with both the fiscal and the physical aspects of such projects.
“We just painted the exterior of the Grave House,” he says. “It’s an expensive proposition. All 21 windows needed work. Six of them had to be taken out and taken to a specialist shop.”
A self-described frugal New Englander, he often talks of the wonder of matching funds.
“That was a $30,000 project there,” he says, “but we were able to raise $15,000 in advance, and then get a match for that, so basically it was all other people’s money.”
Looking at the Library
Henry took a position on the board of the Scranton Library after a friend was about to rotate off it. It was then that Henry learned that the library owned a few old structures in the back, including the 1865 building known as the Old Post Office. They had been purchased as part of the planned library expansion that was voted down in a referendum in 2008.
The Old Post Office, Henry says, “had a big hole in the roof. Squirrels were getting in and doing all sorts of damage. I made a statement which has been quoted back to me—and I quote myself a lot—I said, ‘I don’t know what you can do, I don’t know what you should do, but I can tell you this: You can’t do nothing.’”
The board president asked him to be the chair of the Buildings and Grounds Committee.
“Following my own rule,” Henry says, “which is if you make a suggestion, you ought to be willing to follow up on it, I said, ‘Sure.’ That was 2012, and we’ve been plugging away ever since.”
Working with an architect, the board explored the possibility that the existing buildings could be incorporated into an expanded library.
“At the time I said I knew that a new library project would emerge from this historic-preservation plan,” Henry says.
That project, Henry says, is now estimated to cost $15 million. Madison voters will decide in a February referendum on whether to fund $9 million of that cost through bonding, with the rest coming from existing funds, donors, foundations, and the State of Connecticut.
Despite the 2008 experience, Henry is optimistic about the referendum.
“How many public projects have 40 percent funding from other than the taxpayers?” he asks “So even people who I’d consider the strongest fiscal conservatives in town are saying, ‘Yeah, it’s about time. We needed a new library, and look at the money these people have raised.’”
Henry stresses the practical benefits of the plan, including more square footage, more meeting rooms—he says the library routinely turns down requests for space—more parking, and easier access, as well as the flexibility to allow the building to fulfill different functions in the future.
Taking a Townwide View
Henry’s work at the Grave House and the library made him a natural for the board of the Evarts Archives.
“I think being on all three of those boards gave me an opportunity to see where there were points of friction between different groups in town,” he says. “I used to see that a lot when I worked in D.C. You might have labor unions and think tanks, congressional offices, public and private businesses, all supporting something like the Family and Medical Leave Act, but you can see that there are these points of friction where two groups are going after the same reporters for coverage, going after the same funders for money. They’re kind of like ‘Oh, yeah, we get along fine,’ but not so much.”
Henry has already worked to smooth out the process through which the Madison Historical Society requests materials from the archives.
In addition, he says, “because the Grave House is a nice place to throw a party, we’ve had a mixer in the summer for the last three years where the historical society, the archives, and the Grave Foundation all get together.”
Henry was appointed municipal historian for Madison early this year.
“It’s a pretty vaguely defined position,” he says, “but one thing they ask you to do is to please make sure that the events of your town are recorded.
“We’ve got a perfectly fine newspaper that’s doing a great job of that,” he says graciously, “so I’m going to try next to put together a little compendium—I guess it could be a physical booklet, but also something on a website somewhere—showing successful renovations of older properties, because one of the great tragedies of being on all of these boards is we get notices of every demolition that’s taking place.”
Henry says homeowners can preserve the look of an old house while still having the space they need for modern life.
“There are probably a dozen or more renovations in the last 5 to 10 years around here,” he says, “where people have added an L off the back, or built a barn off to the side, so they have that studio or office space that they want, or put a new kitchen area in the back and kept the front.”
Personal History
Henry’s appreciation of the area’s architectural heritage goes back to his childhood. He spent summers at his great-grandparents’ beach house on Tuxis Road. Born in Hartford, he moved with his family to Westchester County, New York, and then to Bethesda, Maryland, following his father’s career as a journalist.
When his parents divorced, his mother relocated to Madison, and Henry spent his last two years of high school at Daniel Hand.
Although he can name ancestors who graduated from Yale as long ago as 1796, Henry decided to attend Harvard, at least partially because it offered him a better financial aid package. It was there he met his future wife, the journalist Jill Abramson.
“We got to know each other by being in a play together,” he says. “It was a Noël Coward play, Hay Fever. She played a flapper and I played piano.”
After college, the couple worked on political campaigns.
“One of the clients, way back then,” Henry says, “was the guy running for governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton.”
After marrying, Henry and Jill settled in Arlington, Virginia. She worked for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, eventually becoming the latter’s D.C. bureau chief. Henry’s jobs included working for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.”
“I was sort of the parent who makes it home in time to pick up people at piano lessons and such,” says Henry, “so there was a little role reversal there, and that was fine with me.”
They have two children, Cornelia, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who has a one-year-old daughter, and Will, who lives in Brooklyn.
“He is what I’d call a musical entrepreneur,” Henry says. “He’s currently producing a play that he and his wife wrote.”
The family also has what Henry describes as “a third child by choice,” William Woodson, a friend of their son’s whom they helped raise and educate.
They rented vacation houses in Madison for most of the 1980s and 1990s until Henry decided it was time to buy here in 1998. Their home was built in 1785.
Henry says “It’s got floor boards like this”—he holds his hands about a foot apart—”and ceilings like this”—he holds a hand about three inches over his head.
In 2011, Jill became the first female executive editor of the Times. Less than three years later, she was rather abruptly replaced.
“She was beheaded,” Henry says.
She now teaches undergraduate courses at Harvard, writes a column for the British newspaper The Guardian, and is working on a book about the future of news media.
Henry, who is 62, is basically retired. He enjoys collecting postcards, mostly scenes of Madison. He uses his collection in a slide show that he presents to local groups.
Henry’s multiple board positions keep him busy, sometimes requiring him to bend a little. He may occasionally put fund-raising for one organization on the back burner while concentrating on another. But he denies playing favorites.
“I love all my children equally,” he says with a smile, “if not all at the same time.”
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