GFA member and descendant of Michael Griswold, Allan, submitted the following information about Griswold Offset Printing:
Albert Griswold (1911-1985} was born in Vermont into a family descended from an officer in George Washington’s Revolutionary War army who sued for back pay and, in 1780, had to settle for some land in the wilderness of western Vermont. During the Great Depression, Griswold, like so many others, went to Massachusetts to seek work, and found a job at the headquarters of the A&P Supermarket chain, where he learned to operate an offset press at the company’s in-house printshop. This was his first exposure to the craft. After A&P, he moved on to Northfield School for Girls in Northfield, Massachusetts, and ran the printing department there until the school sold the equipment to Brattleboro’s Vermont Printing Company—and Griswold went along with the equipment.
In the early 1950s, while still at Vermont Printing, Griswold realized that there was a local market for offset printing. He bought a small press and started a part-time offset printing business—the first in Vermont—to service the job-printing needs of local customers such as the Latchis Theatre and Dunham Brothers Shoes. The operation was set up in the basement of the Hildreth Press building in the Harmony Block, sharing space with Merrell’s Art Shop, a silkscreen poster printer.
As the business grew, Griswold purchased a larger press and rented space on the third floor at 22 High Street. His older sons, Duane and Ronald, joined the business after serving in the military during 1950s. Allan, a younger son, after honing his skills working for other printers and a high-end pre-press company in Greenfield, Massachusetts, joined the family business and, in the early 1970s, bought out his father’s interest and then his brother Duane’s to gain complete control of the company.
Continuing to grow the business, Allan purchased larger equipment and eventually four-color Komori presses while keeping up with the latest in pre-press and computer technologies. Employing twenty people at its peak, Griswold Offset Printing became Brattleboro’s largest printer of commercial materials such as brochures and catalogs, with an extensive customer base along the Connecticut River from northern Vermont south through Massachusetts and into Connecticut. Griswold even printed books for the Stephen Greene Press of Brattleboro.
In 2005, after a successful run of more than half a century, the company was sold to Springfield Printing of Springfield, Vermont.
