Until well into his eighties, Merton Henry went to his Portland law office daily, continuing the estate practice that brought him into contact with the Maine Community Foundation
Born in Hampden, Maine, just outside Bangor, Henry moved to South Portland when he was 14 and later graduated from Bowdoin College, the first of his family to receive a BA degree. He left the state for law school, but he always expected to return.
Once ensconced in his law practice, getting involved in the community was a given. “It’s a lawyer’s responsibility,” he once stated. Commendations on the wall of his office testified to years of public service by him and his late wife, Judge Harriet P. Henry.
As an estate lawyer who served on the MaineCF board for nine years, Henry would sometimes recommend the foundation when clients had an interest in supporting Maine nonprofits. He often touted MaineCF’s “extraordinary track record for investments.”
Henry also recommended the foundation to clients who were thinking about starting a private foundation, including a successful Wall Street lawyer who had been helping local libraries and historical societies. The lawyer’s family wanted to continue this giving in perpetuity, and came to Henry to establish a foundation with a little more than a million dollars. “I told them, ‘You don’t want a foundation, you want a donor-advised fund.’” Today, a committee consisting of the lawyer’s children and friends reviews grants with MaineCF staff members, continuing his philanthropy.
Henry also found himself suggesting the foundation when clients had a cause, but there was no appropriate institution handling the issue. He encouraged people to set up a fund at MaineCF and “get proposals and make grants according to some sort of discipline” because, he said, “discipline in grantmaking is very important.”
“MaineCF knows Maine as well as any institution in the state,” Henry said. He pointed to its statewide mission, vision, and presence. “It’s one of the reasons I’m so enthused about it: the foundation probably has a better handle in both urban and very rural areas than any other organization in the state today.”
“MaineCF has an extraordinarily talented staff and board,” Henry concluded. “It’s the largest group of people that I know of in Maine who are really focused on building and dispersing philanthropic resources.”
Henry had a bequest to MaineCF written into his estate. His legacy was completely unrestricted—a token of his trust in the foundation, and of his wish to build up MaineCF’s unrestricted endowment. “The board will know where the needs are,” he said, with a certainty born of experience and expertise.
This profile originally appeared in a slightly different version in MaineCF’s fall 2015 Maine Ties newsletter. Henry, who served on the MaineCF Board of Directors from 1995 to 2004, died in 2018.
