195. George Griffin: Revealing the Life and Likeness of Mark Twain’s Butler
Release Date: 10/01/2024
221. New Haven’s Lt. Augusto Rodríguez, First Civil War Soldier from Puerto Rico
Grating the Nutmeg
More than twenty thousand Hispanic Americans served in the Civil War. When Cuban-born Loreta Velázquez’s husband would not allow her to join him on the battlefield, she assumed the role of First Lieutenant Harry T. Buford to be near him. Philip Bazaar, born in Chile, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his courageous exploits during the assault of Fort Fisher. The spying efforts of Floridian Maria Dolores Sánchez and her two sisters led to a Union defeat at the Battle of Horse Landing. Delving into the lives of these individuals, historian A.J. Schenkman, author of...
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220. Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Plant: The Promise and Peril of Nuclear Energy
Grating the Nutmeg
The Connecticut Yankee atomic power plant was one of the earliest commercial nuclear reactors in New England. Though it was dismantled at the turn of the 21st century, its legacy remains, both for the landscape of the Connecticut River Valley where it once stood, and for contemporary debates about energy today. This episode explores the plant’s life and afterlife, the activists who opposed it, and the promises and perils of nuclear power in the 1960s and today, through the reminiscences of Paul Gionfriddo, a former state legislator and longtime president of People’s Action for...
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219. Transgender History and Connecticut Transgender Pioneer Dr. Alan L. Hart
Grating the Nutmeg
The transgender community has struggled to receive recognition and equality. In this episode, we explore the history of the transgender community over the last 100 years with Dr. Susan Stryker and the life of Dr. Alan L. Hart, a transgender medical doctor working on the forefront of an urgent public health crisis, tuberculosis, in Connecticut. Hart, Director of Connecticut’s Office of TB Rehabilitation, is credited with saving countless lives. My guest is Dr. Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History, the Root of Today’s Revolution, published in 2017. Transgender...
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Get cool stuff in our second annual online #GTN benefit auction!
Grating the Nutmeg
We have amazing items for you in our second annual online benefit auction! The auction is the largest fundraiser of the year for our award-winning CT history podcast. New episodes are released every two weeks full of CT history makers and untold stories, and all episodes are free for all to listen to! Bidding begins on September 25, 2025 at midnight. Bids close at 11:59 on October 18, 2025.
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218. Connecticut in the Industrial Revolution: Making Buttons in Cheshire
Grating the Nutmeg
A button sounds like a very ordinary thing. But button production in Cheshire was part of Connecticut’s pioneering role in the precision manufacturing revolution of the nineteenth century. According to connecticuthistory.org, button production began with pewter buttons in the mid-eighteenth century but quickly turned to brass in the early nineteenth century. By 1860s, machines in the Scovill Brass factory in Waterbury produced 216,000 buttons per day. This type of industrial production volume for an everyday necessity such as buttons propelled investors and entrepreneurs to establish...
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217. The Smith Family of Glastonbury: Hannah and Her Daughters
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode of Grating the Nutmeg, Natalie Belanger tells us about how two journals kept by a Revolutionary War-era girl in the ’s collection have inspired an original work of music. Several years ago, Leonard Raybon (Associate Professor of Music at Tulane University) encountered two journals and other writings by Hannah Hadassah Hickok, held at the Connecticut Museum. Hannah was the matriarch of the non-conformist Smith Family of Glastonbury. Her daughters would go on to became nationally famous for protesting their lack of voting rights in the 1870s by...
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216. Brewing Community: Labor, Alcohol, and Unrest in Industrial New Britain
Grating the Nutmeg
Immigrants from Lithuania who made their way to New Britain, Connecticut at the beginning of the twentieth century found work in the city’s factories turning out tools and hardware. Their weekly routine included work, church and socializing at neighborhood saloons. But major upheavals in American society were happening at the time that affected their lives including the rise of organized labor, the temperance movement, anti-immigrant sentiment, and labor strikes. In this episode, we have two new voices in public history, Central Connecticut State University students Jon Kozak and...
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215. Connecticut’s Wild Visionary: Children’s Author Maurice Sendak
Grating the Nutmeg
Artist and author Maurice Sendak was able to achieve significant and enduring success in art and children’s literature during his lifetime. But what secrets did he had to keep from his family, publishers, parents, librarians, and readers as a gay, Jewish man negotiating the field of children’s literature? Sendak wrote and illustrated books that nurtured children and adults alike. Winner of the 1964 Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are, in 1970 Sendak became the first American illustrator to receive the international Hans Christian Anderson Award, given in...
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214. Monstrous: The Business of Whaling
Grating the Nutmeg
Whaling was big business. Connecticut and her sister New England states built ships, forged cast iron tools, produced wooden storage casks and outfitted sailors. Stonington, Mystic, New London, and New Haven were part of New England’s predominance in successful whaling. We’re going to get into the nitty gritty of the trade in this episode and hear about some of the striking artifacts from Mystic Seaport’s whaling collection - tools, ship logs, harpoons, blubber hooks and scrimshaw - that are on view. They speak to the staggering risks and rewards of the whaling industry that lit...
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213. When the Continental Army Camped in Connecticut
Grating the Nutmeg
The Redding Encampment, Connecticut’s first State Archaeological Preserve, is located in Putnam Memorial State Park. Understanding of the Revolutionary War has emphasized the battles, maneuvers, and war meetings; but far more time was expended during the long periods of winter encampment. The winter months were a brutal test of individual fortitude, unifying command, and local support. In the journal Joseph Plumb Martin kept at the time, he wrote, “We arrived at Redding about Christmas or a little before and prepared to build huts for our winter quarters. And now came on the time...
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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 cscruggs@ccsu.edu
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 info@macdonnellrarebooks.com
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.