195. George Griffin: Revealing the Life and Likeness of Mark Twain’s Butler
Release Date: 10/01/2024
210. The Mattatuck Museum: Waterbury and Summer Leisure
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode, host Mary Donohue visits the in Waterbury, a place that includes stellar architecture, art by some of the most renowned artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and an exhibition that tells the story of Waterbury’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. The Mattatuck Museum is an art and regional history museum on the Green in downtown Waterbury, that started out as a historical society in 1877. Our guest is Rebecca Lo Presti, Assistant Curator. She served as the curator for “ The Art of Leisure” an exhibit that is up now until June 15, 2025. From...
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209. Mary Hall and the Good Will Club
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode, Natalie Belanger of the CT Museum of Culture and History tells the story of the Good Will Club, the forerunner of the youth club movement that got its start in Hartford. But the story of the club can't be separated from that of its founder, a woman who's an inductee of the CT Women's Hall of Fame for her barrier-breaking work in the legal field. There are lots of ways to learn more about the history of the Good Will Club and about Mary Hall. Here’s a partial list of sources consulted for this episode: Elizabeth Warren, CT Explored, Spring...
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208. Saving Connecticut’s Mid-Century Modern Homes
Grating the Nutmeg
We’re celebrating May, Historic Preservation Month, with an episode on the Modern houses of the 1950s and 1960s. Could you live in a glass house? New Canaan, Connecticut’s Mid-Century Modern homes designed after the Second War are world famous. In addition to Philip Johnson’s Glass House, now a museum, New Canaan has homes designed by Marcel Breuer, Eliot Noyes, Frank Lloyd Wright and Edward Durell Stone. Each one is a part of architectural history and is a masterwork of the era’s most talented architects. But by the 1990s, people began to demolish these relatively...
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207. Book and Dagger: Yale Professors Become Successful WWII Spies
Grating the Nutmeg
In her new book, Book and Dagger, How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of the World, Dr. Elyse Graham tells the story of academics, like Yale literature professor Joseph Curtis, who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents, and Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa. At the start of World War II, the United States found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and in an...
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206. Hartford’s Rural Cemetery: Cedar Hill
Grating the Nutmeg
Last year in episode 186, we talked about Grove Street Cemetery’s pioneering role as the first planned cemetery in the country. The design of Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven in the 1790s used several of the features that became standard, like family plots and established walkways. Today, we’re going to move the clock forward and discuss the rural cemetery movement of the 19th century with in Hartford as a signature example. Established in 1864, Cedar Hill Cemetery encompasses 270 acres of landscaped woodlands, waterways, and memorial grounds. The urban oasis...
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205. Coffee — A Connecticut Story
Grating the Nutmeg
Coffee is more than a hot drink or a boost of caffeine. For Connecticans, it’s hundreds of years of history. It has fueled new ideas, social reform, and workers’ rights. It is comfort in wartime and connections across cultures. It is universal, yet distinctly local. In this episode, the 's Natalie Belanger chats with her colleague, Karen Li Miller, about the Museum's new exhibition exploring these connections, Coffee — A Connecticut Story. Make sure to visit the Museum's web site to see upcoming programs! Thanks to the for their financial sponsorship of...
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204. Artistry, Charm, and Whimsy: Connecticut’s Carousel Museum
Grating the Nutmeg
Carousels are marvels of brightly painted animals, mechanical excellence, music and lights. Located in a historic mill building in Bristol, the houses well over 100 antique wooden carousel animals including white rabbits, pigs, lions and even an alligator. The museum has a full-size carousel inside the building complete with beautifully painted horses and Wurlitzer music - and you can take a merry-go-round ride during any season of the year. Plus, you can take a peek into their restoration workshop. Our guest for this episode is Morgan Fippinger, Executive Director. Plan your...
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203. Amistad Retold: New Haven and the 1839 Amistad Revolt
Grating the Nutmeg
The New Haven Museum staff and their community partners have reinterpreted the Amistad story in an exhibition that takes a new angle on the familiar story of the Amistad. The 1839 Amistad Revolt was led by 53 West African captives who were being trafficked from Havana’s slave markets on the schooner La Amistad after being kidnapped from their homeland. For nearly 19 months in New Haven, the Amistad captives worked closely with anti-slavery activists who formed the Amistad Committee and connected with networks of engaged citizens to organize and fundraise for their legal defense....
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202. Miss Crandall’s School for Black Women
Grating the Nutmeg
After a campaign initiated by schoolchildren, Prudence Crandall was designated the Connecticut State Heroine by the Connecticut General Assembly on Oct. 1, 1995. You may not know Connecticut has a state heroine, or you might have some inkling that Crandall was maybe a spinster Quaker schoolmarm, who had an unsuccessful school in the hinterlands of eastern Connecticut. Founded in 1833, the Crandall Academy educated more than two dozen Black women during its eighteen-month existence. In this episode we’ll hear how a trio of like-minded women helped to get the academy off the...
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201. The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir with Griffin Dunne
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode, Host Mary Donohue talks to Griffin Dunne, actor, producer and director and now New York Times best-selling author about his family memoir The Friday Afternoon Club. His Hartford to Hollywood family includes generations of writers, movie producers, journalists, and actors including his father Dominick Dunne, uncle John Gregory Dunne, and aunt Joan Didion. This prominent family dynasty has part of its roots in Irish-American Connecticut, coming from Ireland to Derby and Hartford. Irish Catholics, unwelcome in Protestant Connecticut from the jump in the 1820s,...
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Most people know something about Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens. After all, he wrote his most famous books while living in Hartford, Connecticut. His 25-room house on Farmington Avenue cost over $40,000 in 1874 dollars. Raised as a child in Missouri, he became world famous for his wit and humor both in print and on stage. But what if the man who served as Twain’s butler for 17 years had a story that was just as powerful and gripping as Twain’s? In today’s episode we are going to meet that man, George Griffin.
Twain scholar and collector Kevin MacDonnell's biographical sketch George Griffin: Meeting Mark Twain's Butler which provides the most comprehensive look into Griffin’s life to date, and brings us face to face with the man who is said to have inspired Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. George Griffin came to wash the windows in Mark Twain’s new house in 1874 and stayed for seventeen years, taking on the position of butler, the highest-ranking employee in the household.
A photograph of Griffin was discovered recently. It is the only known picture of the man who was also a prominent leader in Hartford’s Black community, serving as deacon of Hartford’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
The guests in this episode are Dr. Camesha Scruggs, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and Twain scholar Kevin MacDonnell.
Dr. Scruggs received her PhD in history from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her current manuscript project is a further examination of how interventions from social, civic, government, secondary and higher education institutions impact the occupation of domestic service during the New Deal Era. She may be contacted at [email protected]
Kevin MacDonnell earned his MLS at the University of Texas and serves on the editorial board of the Mark Twain Journal. He has contributed articles to the Mark Twain Encyclopedia (1993), co-edited Mark Twain and Youth, and has reviewed over fifty books for the Mark Twain Forum. His collection of more than 11,000 Mark Twain items--first editions, letters, photographs, archives, manuscripts, and artifacts--is the largest in private hands and is frequently shared with other scholars and museums. He gives frequent lectures on Twain and may be reached at [email protected]
Copies of The Mark Twain Journal featuring Kevin MacDonnell’s biographical sketch George Griffin: Meeting Mark Twain’s Butler Face-to-Face may be purchased from the Mark Twain House Museum Store for $12.00. The link to the journal in the museum shop is here: https://marktwainhousestore.org/products/mark-twain-journal-volume-62-number-1
You can also take a special tour of the Twain House.
The George Griffin Living History Tour invites visitors to step back in time to the year 1885. The premise of the tour is that the Clemens family are looking to hire a new cook, and Mr. Griffin has been tasked with conducting the first round of interviews—after all, as the head of the domestic staff, he knows exactly the kind of temperament and skills needed to keep the house running. He leads visitors through each restored room of the house, and gives them his own experience of not only the domestic labor done in that space, but also the emotional labor that he must navigate daily as a formerly enslaved black man working in the house of a wealthy white family. And who is “G. G., Chief of Ordnance?” Find out for yourself when you take a Living History tour with George Griffin.
Dr. Scruggs' Reading Recommendations:
To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War by Tera Hunter
The African -American Experience in Nineteenth Century Connecticut: Benevolence and Bitterness by Theresa Vara Dannen
Hopes and Expectations: The Origins of the Black Middle Class in Hartford by Barbara Beeching
VIDEO: Dr. Cameesha Scruggs, Rev. Samuel Blanks of the AME Zion Church, and Kevin MacDonnell participate in a panel discussion led by Steve Courtney:
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This episode of Grating the Nutmeg was produced by Mary Donohue and engineered by Patrick O’Sullivan at www.highwattagemedia.com/ Follow GTN on our Facebook, Instagram and Threads pages.
You can find host and executive producer Mary Donohue on Facebook and Instagram: @WeHaSidewalkHistorian. Join us in two weeks for the next episode of Grating the Nutmeg, the podcast of Connecticut history.