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Silas Griffith

Silas L. Griffith (June 27, 1837 - July 21,1903) was a Vermont businessman and politician. His lumber and charcoal operations made him the first millionaire in the state of Vermont and a major landowner.

Early Life

Silas Griffith was born into a large and poor farm family in Danby, Vermont. As a boy Silas worked on the family farm but even as a youth showed a flair for driving a hard bargain and reinterpreting rules to his own benefit. His father one day offered to pay his sons for every rock moved from a field. The other brothers dutifully carried theirs to the stone walls around the field while young Silas distributed his in several piles around the field.

Griffith attended local schools until age 16 after which he worked for a few years at local stores in Danby, and East Dorset. With these savings he attended Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, NH for one year. This was the extent of his formal schooling.

Griffith then headed west for a teaching job but the financial panic of 1857 stranded him in Buffalo, NY. With his few savings now devalued he could afford to neither continue west or return home. With some money advanced by a cashier at a local bank he returned home to Danby where, borrowing money from an uncle, he opened a general store in his hometown.

With his natural aptitude for business Griffith’s store flourished. By the time he was 27 his business was valued at $48,000, over $800,000 in today’s dollars. The business continued to prosper and Griffith’s interests began to spread. He built a new store - at 3 stories it was the tallest building in southern Vermont. He also developed a municipal water system for the town of Danby.

Personal Life

Griffith’s personal life was not a happy one. He married Elisabeth Staples who bore him three daughters and a son. Two daughters died before the age of two and his son died at the age of ten. Only his daughter Jenny survived to adulthood.

After twenty some years of marriage, and in an unusual event for that time, Griffith’s wife sued for divorce on the grounds of “intolerable severity”. The divorce was granted and he paid her a one time settlement of $20,000; a great deal of money at that time. Shortly after he paid his secretary a one time settlement of $10,000 as well, suggesting alternative definitions of “intolerable severity”.

In 1891 Griffith was re-married, to a distant cousin from Philadelphia, Katherine Teil, 18 years his junior. The new Mrs. Griffith was adamant that she would not live in the same house where Griffith had lived with his first wife. Griffith promptly set to work having the old house torn down (the lumber carefully saved and burned to make charcoal) and built a new beautiful home for his beautiful bride. The home boasted sweeping views, intricate woodwork, and exquisite stained glass windows. Today the estate is open to overnight guests as the award winning Silas Griffith Inn.

Business Career

Although he operated several businesses already, Griffith’s real fortune came from Vermont’s forested mountains. He acquired several large tracts of land, often through foreclosure, in the towns of Mt Tabor, Danby, Dorset, Arlington, Peru, Manchester, and Groton, eventually totalling more than 50,000 acres. Griffith’s first lumber mill in Mt Tabor grew into the small company town called Griffith (later called Old Job), which boasted a school, store, boarding house (for male employees), a blacksmith, and stables; some 40 - 50 buildings in all.

He eventually built nine lumber mills, each with a small settlement to serve it, to reduce the distance lumber had to be hauled to reach the railroad running through the valley and connecting Vermont to southern New England and New York. To connect his scattered holdings he installed what is believed to be the first telephone system in Vermont connecting each mill to the main office.

Lumber was only one product to come out of the hills. Griffith may have been a wealthy man, but he could not abide waste and soon built some 35 huge charcoal kilns to convert scrap wood into charcoal, about a million bushels of it per year, which fuelled factories throughout New England and made Griffith Vermont’s first millionaire.

Not content with this, Griffith collected the sawdust from his mills and sold it to icehouses to insulate the ice and prevent it from melting. As a sideline Griffith harnessed the cool mountain streams to create a fish hatchery, perhaps the first in the state, eventually supplying the Waldorf Astoria in New York with fresh trout. In 1898 then Senator Griffith acquired both timberland and a fish hatchery in Groton, VT. That fish hatchery was reputed to be the largest in the world and provided spawn for stocking rivers and lakes as well as adult fish for eating.

Legacy

Griffith had a well deserved reputation for squeezing both profits and workers. To prevent “clock watching” he forbid his workers to wear watches and insisted to critics that they enjoyed working from dawn to dark, leading “ a life of excitement and ... pleasure.” Workers and their families were expected to buy their food and clothing from the company’s six general stores, cycling their wages back into Griffith’s pocket.

Bradley Bender tells of one worker who quit his job and as he walked away was intercepted by Griffith who reminded the worker of his unpaid tab at the company store - including the purchase of the pants he had on. Griffith insisted the man take them off and hand them over before leaving.

In his later years Griffith seems to have determined that he wanted to leave a better legacy behind than his scrooge-like reputation. He donated money for the S.L. Griffith Memorial Library, which serves Danby to this day, an orphans fund and several other buildings in town.

Memorably, and more inexplicably, Silas Griffith and his wife left money and instructions in their wills to establish a gift fund. At an annual Christmas party, a tradition still going strong today, each child in Danby and Mt. Tabor between the ages of 2 and 12 is to receive a gift and, by Griffith’s instructions, an orange. This tradition is cherished through the generations in the two hard scrabble towns and has done much to burnish S.L. Griffith’s legacy. In some difficult years Griffith’s gifts might be the only gift a child received.

Upon Griffith’s death on July 23 1903 at his ranch in San Diego, his business empire shut down. Years of cutting had left the hillsides bare, a disgruntled enemy had poisoned his fish hatchery, and charcoal was being replaced by oil.

Ultimately the Forest Service acquired much of Griffith’s land which is now covered in second growth forest. Abandoned buildings and mills were burned as hazards or moved, charcoal kilns were torn down, and railroad sidings pulled up. The Appalachian Trail and Vermont’s Long Trail run right through the site of the former mill town of Griffith, now marked only by a few stone foundations and an enormous pile of century old sawdust.

References

<ref> Bushnell, Mark (December 20, 2009), “VT Children Still Benefit From Local Scrooge’s Redemption”; Times Argus (Montpelier, VT)<ref>

<ref> Calta, Marialisa (December 23, 1987), “A Lumber Baron And His Gift of Toys”; The New York Times<ref>

<ref> Author unknown, (1898), “The Trout Industry”; The Free Press, (Montpelier, VT)<ref>

<ref> Varrichio, Louis, (December 5, 2011), “Vermont Ghost Hunters Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts”; Addison Eagle, (Middlebury, VT)<ref>

<ref> Bradley Bender - Lecture at The Tutorial Center at Smokey House, December 2, 2013, Danby, VT.<ref>