Griggs was born on December 27, 1868, in Chaska, Minnesota, the third son and fourth of six children of Chauncey Wright and Martha Ann (Gallup) Griggs. His grandparents were early Yankee migrants to the Middle W. His father, who commanded a Minnesota regiment in the Civil War, was a banker, railway contractor, and later a lumberman; he served for many years on the board of aldermen of St. Paul, Minnesota, and in the state legislature.
After attending St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, young Griggs graduated from Yale College in 1890 and took additional engineering courses at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale.
In 1892 Griggs entered the employ of the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company, recently founded at Tacoma, Washington, by his father and a group of Minnesota associates. Here he learned lumber manufacture and marketing from the ground up, beginning as timekeeper, working up to mill superintendent (1893), and becoming president in 1908, a position he held until 1933, when he became chairman of the board. Griggs thus directed one of the largest timber operations in the Pacific Northwest during the days when the Douglas-fir lumber industry was expanding, organizing, and fighting for markets. Strongly "industry-minded, " Griggs constantly strove to overcome the rampant individualism among his fellow lumbermen. He was an organizer and for ten years (1903-1913) president of the Pacific Coast Lumber Manufacturers Association, the first attempt of the northwest mills to work together for standard lumber grades, better freight rates, and wider markets. Later he was an active leader in the West Coast Lumbermen's Association, which absorbed earlier groups and became the champion of the mills in trade promotion, lumber tariffs, production and price statistics, and expanding relations with the federal government. For many years also he represented the Northwest in the National Lumber Manufacturers Association at Washington, D. C. , of which he was president, 1911-1912. He was one of the incorporators (1916) and president (1923-1935) of what became the Douglas Fir Export Company, organized under the Webb-Pomerene Act to stimulate foreign trade; and he made extended journeys to expand lumber marketing in South America, Europe, and Japan. During the first World War, as an officer in the army signal corps, Griggs served on the staff of the Spruce Production Division and devoted much of his time to organizing northwest logging camps and sawmills for the maximum production of Sitka spruce, vitally needed by the Allied air fleets. Griggs was among the first of the West Coast lumbermen to become convinced that private landowners should hold and reforest their cutover lands as a matter of policy or obligation to the community, and that in the long run this course would pay commercially. He was further convinced that the only way the lumber industry could avoid public regulation was to take the initiative itself. He was an active member of the Western Forestry and Conservation Association, created in 1909 by farsighted lumbermen and foresters for cooperation in fire control, forest taxes, and practical forms of industrial forestry, and this organization was soon examining the holdings of its members and advising them on timber-cutting policies. In his own company he took active steps to educate employees and the communities in which they lived on the importance of reforestation to perpetuate employment, and he dramatized by effective publicity the planting of new trees on logged-over lands. "The Major, " as Griggs was always called, was a "joiner, " identified with many civic and religious groups in his city and state. He died at Tacoma on March 6, 1938, of a cerebral hemorrhage and was buried in the Tacoma Cemetery.
President of the National Lumber Manufacturers Association (1911-1912); President of the Pacific Coast Lumber Manufacturers Association (1903-1913); President of the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company (1908-1933); member of the Western Forestry; member of the Conservation Association.
Griggs married Grace Isabel Wallace at Portland, Oregon, on July 6, 1895. They had no children; but their hospitable home at Gravelly Lake near Tacoma was well filled with nephews, nieces, and neighbors.
