HENRY SCRIPPS BOOTH

(1897-1988)

Third and youngest son of George and Ellen Booth.  In many ways Harry is the child of Ellen and George Booth who cared most about the wellbeing of the Cranbrook Educational Community following the death of his parents. In addition to having played a major role in designing the layout of the campus with his father and being the architect of both Brookside School and his sisters’ houses adjacent to the campus, Harry was a champion of historic preservation of both buildings and landscape and gardens. All three sons of George G. Booth plus Jim Beresford were successor trustees to George and Ellen for the Cranbrook Foundation, but Harry as Executive Director cared the most and gave it his full attention. Harry donated to Cranbrook his own house (Thornlea) and gardens which he designed and built. It is doubtful that Cranbrook House and Gardens would have survived and remained a part of the campus but for Harry’s effort to organize and encourage volunteer support for the care and maintenance of the House and Garden. Harry founded the Cranbrook House and Garden Auxilary in 1971.

From the Cranbrook website for Cranbrook House and Garden:

“In 1966, as the trustees deliberated demolishing the house (Cranbrook House) and subdividing the property, the former Foundation executive director Henry Scripps Booth- the youngest son of George and Ellen Booth-moved his office into the west wing of the house. He subsequently was joined by regular Foundation personnel, and by the early 1970’s the house was well on its way to serving as the administrative hub of Cranbrook. This mission was reinforced after the 1973 creation of the Cranbrook Educational Community, the trust under which Cranbrook operates today.

 In 1971, Henry Scripps Booth and a small group of concerned individuals, organized what would later become the Cranbrook House and Garden Auxiliary with intentions to preserve, maintain, and share the Booth’s historic manor home and forty acre estate. Over five decades and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours later, the non-profit organization still carries on that mission.”

NOTE: Today the Cranbrook Gardens are one of the largest public estate gardens in the United States maintained almost exclusively by volunteers.

Harry Booth’s philantrophy was by no means limited to Cranbrook and Christ Church Cranbrook.  Harry Booth was the anonymous donor most responsible for saving Orchestra Hall from demolition until it’s expansion with funds from the family of Max Fisher. Harry Booth was also the anonymous donor of a number of art purchases for the Detroit Institute of Arts as well as the anonymous donor of the carved stone statue of George Washington wearing his Masonic Order apron standing in front of Mariner’s Church on Jefferson Avenue adjacent to the entrance to the tunnel to Canada.

Henry Scripps Booth’s wife Carolyn Farr Booth became a close friend of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the pioneer American aviator Charles Lindbergh, during the Lindbergh family stay in Detroit during World War II. The Lindberghs rented a stone Cotswold style manor house, “Stonelea”, which was located very close to “Thornlea” along Cranbrook Road , adjacent and just to the north of the Kingswood School. This property has since been donated to the Cranbrook Educational Community and has been chosen to be the new home of the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research.