[2] In his youth Grismer attended the Albany Boys Academy and upon graduation served with the 192nd New York Volunteer Regiment during the waning months of the American Civil War.

At the latter he met and fell in love with Phoebe Davies, a young actress from Wales who had come to prominence at the Baldwin playing Hortense in a production of Dickens’ Bleak House.

They married in San Francisco on June 1, 1882, and not long afterward formed their own company of stock players known as the Grismer-Davies Organization and began playing theaters throughout California and eventually across the Western States and Provinces of North America.

[16] The couple next appeared together in the Sutton Vane Sr. play, Humanity, as Lt. Bevis Cranbourne and Alma Dunbar, which opened in New York at the Fourteenth Street Theatre on February 4, 1895.

[17] Later Grismer, with actor turned producer William A. Brady, a former member of his company in California, purchased the rights to Lottie Blair Parker’s Way Down East, a pastoral play about country life in New England.

With Grismer’s elaborations and with Davies playing the lead role Anna Moore opposite Howard Kyle as David Bartlett, Way Down East debuted on September 3, 1897, at Providence Rhode Island and the following month made its New York premier at the Manhattan Theatre.