Program

NYS Historic, Pomeroy Education Program

Subject

House, People

Location

131 Academy St, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601, USA

Lat/Long

41.696387735773, -73.92831932784

Grant Recipient

Arlington High School

Alfred Mosher Butts was born in April 1899 in Poughkeepsie, New York. Raised at 131 Academy Street, he moved to his oldest brother’s home on the same street following his father’s death in 1911. After graduating from Poughkeepsie High School in 1917, Butts attended the Pratt Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, earning a degree in architecture in 1924. He worked for an architectural firm in New York City until the Great Depression left him unemployed, prompting him in 1931 to develop a game to earn income.

Butts grew up playing the Victorian-era game Anagrams with his four older brothers, though they eventually found its standard tile mechanics boring. Recognizing that the game included equal distributions of all letters despite varying usage in the English language, Butts calculated letter frequencies by analyzing the front pages of the New York Times. He adjusted the tile distribution to reflect these frequencies and assigned higher point values to rarer letters, shifting the game’s focus from simple word volume to skill-based scoring.

The game evolved over seven to eight years. Butts and his wife, Nina, initially play-tested the concept without a board or crossword structure. To increase the difficulty, Butts later added a board, tile racks, and a crossword format. He eventually introduced scoring multipliers to complete the game mechanics.

Using his architectural skills to draft blueprints and manufacture wooden models, Butts produced an initial batch of 25 sets for friends under the name Lexico, later changing it to Criss Cross Words. He sold a second batch of 25 sets to acquaintances. The first tile sets were manufactured in 1933, followed by the addition of the board in 1936. By the late 1930s, the final design was complete, but major game manufacturers rejected it due to a market focus on children’s entertainment.

Production halted during World War II due to plywood shortages, and Butts returned to his architectural firm. In 1948, his friend James Brunot took over production efforts, renaming the game Scrabble. Operating initially out of his home and later a rented space, Brunot barely broke even, selling a few hundred sets per week to local shops and bookstores.

Sales increased abruptly in 1952 to thousands of sets per week. Anticipating a temporary holiday fad, Butts and Brunot were instead met with sustained demand that exceeded their manufacturing capacity. The game companies that had previously rejected the concept sought production rights, leading Butts and Brunot to license mass-production rights in exchange for royalties.

The partners expanded the product line to include cardboard editions, magnetic travel sets, deluxe editions, and foreign-language versions in German, French, and Spanish. They also collaborated with the American Foundation for the Blind to develop and distribute a free Braille edition. By 1955, the word “Scrabble” was officially added to the dictionary. Butts used his early royalty earnings to repurchase the Daniel Butts Homestead in Stanfordville, New York, an ancestral property that had left family ownership in 1890.

By 1981, Scrabble sales outpaced Monopoly by 20 percent under the ownership of Selchow & Righter, which had acquired the game in the 1970s. Following subsequent corporate acquisitions by Coleco and later Hasbro, the modern rights are split, with Hasbro producing United States versions and Mattel manufacturing international editions as of 2026.

The student-led application for this grant came from students at Arlington High School, led by instructor Robert McHugh. The students researched Alfred M. Butts, then gathered and submitted the required materials for the historical marker as part of our Pomeroy Education Program.