Francis H. Griggs, president of the Citizens' National Bank of Davenport, was born on the fourteenth of November, 1834, in Brookline, one of the suburbs of the city of Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were Thomas and Harriet (Fuller) Griggs, both natives of the Bay State.
His early education was obtained in the public schools of Brookline. In 1850 he entered Harvard University, taking the full collegiate course and graduating in 1854. In the early part of 1855 he removed to Davenport, Iowa, where he has since resided. Until 1873 Mr. Griggs was engaged in mercantile pursuits, from 1855 to 1859 in the shoe and leather business, and from 1860 to 1873 in the printing and publishing business. Since 1873, with a brief interval of travel, his duties as president of the Citizens' National Bank have largely occupied his time.
A successful business man and an able financier, Mr. Griggs is also a man of varied talents, and had he chosen to follow a profession or any of the callings in life in which superior intellectual endowment com bined with cool and almost unerring judgment and indefatigable industry count for so much, he would almost certainly have achieved unusual distinction and friends. Having been identified many years with the financial, commercial and industrial development of Daven port, his history is interwoven with that of the city and it would be impossible in this connection to call attention to even a small portion of the work he has done toward building up the city. His whole life has been spent in advancing the best interests of the community, and we can hardly do more in this brief sketch than name a few of the charac teristics which have made him conspicuous among his contemporaries and more than ordinarily useful as a citizen of one of the leading cities of Iowa. Exact and careful in his business methods, his natural sagacity, thorough education and keen perceptions applied to financial and economic problems have been prolific of good results, and while advancing his own interests he has materially advanced also the interests of the City of Davenport and its tributary country. Self possessed, and possessing a keen insight into the character and motives of men, his fairness and frankness equal his firmness and decisiveness, and his good judgment and strict integrity have made him the wise counselor of scores of successful business men.
Though always a busy man, he is never so much engrossed with his own affairs that he does not receive a visitor with marked courtesy, and when pressing demands upon his time render it necessary to cut short an interview, he has the happy faculty of bringing the interview to a close without making his visitor feel that he has been served with a verbal writ of ejectment.
Affiliating with the Democratic party, Mr. Griggs has had not infrequent manifestations of the good will of his fellow-citizens in their evident disposition to confer upon him official honors, but he has always declined political preferment of any kind. Outside of his business affairs he has interested himself chiefly in a quiet and unostentatious way in charitable and benevolent work, and his beneficence has been of that practical kind which confers the most substantial benefits upon the recipients of it.
Mr. Griggs was married in 1861 to Miss Candace Watson, daughter of Joseph Watson of Indianapolis, Indiana.
BIOGRAPHIES