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Hall Lyman was an American physician, clergyman, and statesman. He was governor of Georgia from 1783 to 1784.
Background
Lyman Hall was born on April 12, 1727, in Wallingford, Connecticut, United States, the son of John and Mary (Street) Hall, citizens of the town of Wallingford, Connecticut. His father was descended from John Hall who came to Boston in 1633, later moved to New Haven, and about 1670 settled in Wallingford; his mother was a grand-daughter of Reverend Samuel Street, first pastor of the church in that town.
Education
After graduation from Yale in 1747, Hall studied theology under his uncle, Reverend Samuel Hall.
Career
In June 1749 Lyman Hall began to preach at Bridgeport, Connecticut, as a candidate for ordination. He was from the first at odds with his congregation, and finally, in June 1751, he was dismissed by the Consociation after a hearing on charges of immoral conduct. The charges were proven and confessed by him, but the Consociation, confident of the sincerity of his repentance, voted that he be restored to good standing in the ministry and he continued for two years to fill vacant pulpits. Meanwhile, Hall decided to abandon preaching, studied medicine, and set up as a practitioner at Wallingford.
In his early thirties Lyman joined a group of New England Congregationalists whose forebears had migrated in 1697 to South Carolina and taken up land at a place which they named Dorchester, near Charleston. About the time he joined Congregationalists they began another migration and between 1752 and 1756, the entire colony had moved to the “Midway District” on the coast of Georgia, where in 1758 they founded the town of Sunbury. For the purposes of local government, Georgia was divided into parishes, and the Sunbury settlement was the most important part of St. John’s Parish.
The site of the settlement was unhealthful: the dwellings and plantation quarters were located on the edge of malarious swamps, so that Hall had ample scope for the practice of his professional skill. He became a leader in his section.
In the early days of the revolutionary movement Georgia was lukewarm, but St. John’s Parish became the center of a revolutionary group. Of all these Puritans, Lyman Hall was probably the hottest advocate of the revolutionary cause. When the Provincial Congress failed to join hands with the other colonies, St. John’s Parish, under Hall’s leadership, held a convention of its own and extended an invitation to the people of the other parishes to join with it in sending delegates to the Continental Congress. Receiving no encouragement, St. John’s Parish acted on its own initiative and elected Hall, in March 1775, as a delegate. He was admitted to the Congress and though refraining from voting took part in the debates. When Georgia was finally brought around to the revolutionary cause, Hall retained his seat in the Continental Congress as a member from Georgia and with his colleagues Button Gwinnett and George Walton he signed the Declaration of Independence.
When the British subjugated the coast of Georgia in 1778, Hall’s residence in Savannah and his rice plantation were destroyed. He thereupon moved his family to the North and resided there until the close of the war. Returning to Georgia with the coming of peace, he made Savannah his home and resumed the practice of medicine. In 1783 Hall was elected governor of Georgia. In a message to the General Assembly, July 8, 1783, he made a remarkable recommendation, to wit, that a grant of land be set aside for the endowment of a state-supported institution of higher learning. This recommendation led, the following year, to the chartering of one of the first state-supported universities in America, with an endowment of 40, 000 acres of land. After his brief term of office Hall removed in 1790 to Burke County, Georgia, where he invested his accumulations in a plantation. There he died, within a few months, in his sixty-seventh year.
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Personality
Hall Lyman was a man of education and polish, of social habits and a well-rounded character.
Interests
medicine
Connections
Hall Lyman was twice married: first on May 20, 1752, to Abigail Burr, daughter of Thaddeus and Abigail Burr of Fairfield, Connecticut, who died July 8, 1753; second, before he left Connecticut, to Mary Osborn, daughter of Samuel and Hannah Osborn, also of Fairfield. His only son, John, was born of the second marriage.