The Hall Family

Their Stone Says Polly

They lie together under one stone, in a burying ground that carries her family's name. It reads:

In Memoriam
Hall
Richard Hall
1786 — 1855
and his wife
1791 – Polly – 1854
“Death Is The Crown Of Life”

Two things follow from it. The smaller one is a date: the stone says 1786 where this archive has carried 1785. The day and month have never been in doubt — the twenty-first of October — only the year, and a stone cut by grieving family is not the same thing as a record made at the time. Both stay on file.

The larger one is a name. Her children did not carve Mary. They carved Polly. That was what she was called in that house, firmly enough that it is the word they chose to leave in granite over her grave for a hundred and seventy years.

Which bears on the oldest open question in this whole archive. The Stalnaker book says James Stewart Hitt's mother was a “Polly Hall”; the 1932 reunion history says Richard and Polly's daughter Mary married a Hitt. If those are the same woman, then James Hamlin Hall and Patricia Ann Stalnaker — who grew up down the same creek and married in 1949 — were third cousins, and Townes descends from Richard Hall twice over.

This stone does not prove that. What it proves is that in this exact family, a Mary was called Polly — publicly, permanently, in stone. It is the strongest circumstantial support the hypothesis has ever had, and it is still circumstantial.

Their Daughter Mary — and Townes's Double Descent

Richard and Polly had a daughter, Mary Elizabeth Hall, born 4 January 1830. The 1932 reunion history says she “became the wife of William Hitt.”

That sentence has been sitting here for a year with a question mark on it, because Patricia Ann Stalnaker — Ian's grandmother, who married James Hamlin Hall around 1949 — had a great-grandmother her family called “Polly Hall.” If those were the same woman, then James and Patricia, who grew up down the same creek, were third cousins, and Townes descends from Richard Hall on both sides.

Four things came together in one afternoon.

The stone above proves the name. Richard's wife was Mary Bailey, and her own children carved Polly. In this household, a Mary was called Polly.

Her son's death record names her. James Stewart Hitt died in Lewis County on 30 August 1947. West Virginia's own register gives his father as William Hitt and his mother as Mary Hall — an official document confirming, from the Hitt side and seventy-eight years after the reunion, exactly what the Hall family said in 1932.

Her own death record dates her. A widow named Mary Hitt died on 10 December 1907 at Freemans Creek — the Halls' own creek — aged 77 years, 11 months and 6 days.

And that arithmetic lands on 4 January 1830. Not near it. On it. The same day Richard and Polly's daughter Mary was born.

And then the marriage itself turned up. Lewis County's own register, entry 34:

James W. Hitt
to
Mary Hall
— Marriage license issued by the fathers of both parties being present and consenting —
Nov. 15th 1850

Read the clause about the fathers carefully, because it is doing more work than it looks. On the same two pages, in the same hand, the clerk writes “both parties being past the age of 21 years” for couple after couple. He records a father's consent only when someone is a minor — and two entries earlier he names one outright: “James Blagg father of Nancy Blagg was present and consented.”

So on 15 November 1850, the bride was under twenty-one. Mary Elizabeth Hall, born 4 January 1830, was twenty years and ten months old that day. And her father was alive, in Weston, standing at the clerk's desk.

What is still missing is one name. For entry 34 the clerk wrote only “the fathers of both parties” — two lines after taking the trouble to write down James Blagg's. One careless afternoon in 1850, and a hundred and seventy-six years of ambiguity.

Everything else is now on paper: the birth date that matches to the day, the county, the creek, the minority, the son's own record naming his mother, and a family that wrote it down in 1932.

And one thing that does not line up, which belongs here rather than in a footnote. Every source that names James Stewart Hitt's father calls him William — the 1932 history, the Stalnaker family book, and his own death certificate. The 1850 register calls the groom James W. Hitt.

A statewide search settles what it can: there is no “William Hitt × Mary Hall” marriage anywhere in West Virginia, and three candidate William Hitts in the death index all turn out to belong to other families. So either he was James William Hitt, going by his middle name — far and away the commonest cause of exactly this pattern — or the 1850 groom is a different man and this chain breaks.

So the gap is not quite a single unwritten word. It is one unwritten name and one given name that does not match. This page will not call it proven, and it will not pretend the wrinkle is smaller than it is.

The document that would end the argument is the original 1850 marriage bond and consent certificate — the loose papers filed with the licence, which normally name the consenting father outright and often give the groom in full. The register is only the clerk's summary. Those papers survive separately, at the Lewis County courthouse or at WVU's regional history center. That is the request to make.

James Monroe Hall & Nancy Burnside

James married Nancy Burnside on December 11, 1844 — the original marriage bond survives, signed by James and by Nancy's father William Burnside standing surety. He built one of the district's substantial farms: a 1923 county history says he “eventually became the owner of about 800 acres,” self-made, which matches the $18,000 in real estate the 1870 census taker wrote beside his name. His neighbors elected him Township Supervisor year after year; when he stepped down in 1869, the Weston Democrat — no political friend of his — said goodbye in print.

Nancy died in February 1863, in the middle of the war, leaving James with seven children at home, the youngest not yet a year old. He remarried — Elizabeth Catherine Lovette — and had three more. He died of heart disease in February 1873, age 53, and lies at Freemansburg United Baptist Church, near Nancy.

And Four We Cannot Name

The same book holds a second four-man portrait — two poses from one sitting, one autographed in a hand no one has read yet — kept loose among the album's pages with no caption anywhere. Four young men in the high collars of the 1910s: brothers, almost certainly, and cherished enough that the family's first genealogist kept the prints. She never labeled them, and this page will not guess. If a face here looks like someone from your side of the family — or if the back of the original print carries writing — that is exactly what this living document was built to collect.

The Day They Sold It All

Ten weeks after James was buried, on the first of May 1873, they carried his life out into the yard and sold it, item by item, to his neighbours. The clerk wrote down every buyer and every price, and the resulting sheet is the closest thing this family has to a photograph of that community on a single morning.

His widow bought her own house back. The first and largest line on the bill is “Household and Kitchen furniture — E. C. Hall — $160.95.” Elizabeth Catherine kept going: the mare and both saddles, six yearling cattle, a brindle cow, a red cow, two roan cows, two sows, a barrow, a male hog, twelve head of sheep, and six stands of bees. Widows did this. The law let the estate be sold out from under them and then let them stand in the crowd and bid for their own kitchen table.

The big money went to cattle. John Steele paid $1,331.25 for thirty-five three-year-olds — more than the mowing machine, the wagon, the horses and the whole household put together. A. H. Woodford took twenty-two two-year-olds for $528. G. W. Dixon gave $198.75 for the bay horse; David Bassel $135 for the yoke of oxen.

And the names in the middle column are the family. Reading down the buyers is reading the 1932 reunion history back to front: Lovett, who married James's daughter Sarah; Bailey, who married his daughter Margaret; Lightburn, White, Kemper, McKinley, Jackson, Woodford, Coffindaffer. Brothers, sons, sons-in-law and neighbours, buying a dead man's axes and hoes for fifty cents apiece.

Addison Hall — James's own younger brother, who had helped appraise the estate three weeks earlier — bought two hoes, a lot of boxes and a log chain, and paid cash for them on the spot.

The Westfield Tract

For a long time the farm was a shape without a name. He was “a prosperous farmer.” The 1870 census gave him $18,000 in real estate. That was all anyone could say. A single deed, read out of an unindexed Lewis County book, gives the land a name, a price, a former owner and a date.

In the spring of 1869 a chancery suit was working its way through the Circuit Court of Lewis County — Gehring’s heirs against Israel Ramsburg’s heirs, the sort of tangled estate case that ends with a farm being sold on the courthouse steps. The decree came down on 4 May 1869. John Brannon, as special commissioner, put the land up. And the deed records, flatly, who took it: “at which sale the said James M. Hall became the purchaser for the sum of Two Thousand Five Hundred and Sixty Dollars.” The court confirmed the sale that November.

What he bought was about two hundred and forty-five acres on the West Fork River, known as the “Westfield tract” — Weeden Huffman to Abraham W. Fell, Fell to Ignatius Gehring in January 1860, Gehring to Israel Ramsburg, and now to a farmer from Freemans Creek who paid cash money at a judicial sale. The $18,000 the census taker wrote down the following summer was not inherited. He had just bought it.

And then the sentence that stops you. Four years later, on 19 February 1873, he died — and the clerk had to write this into the record: “the said James M. Hall having departed this life intestate before the execution to him of a deed.”

He had bid on it, paid for it, farmed it for four seasons and died on it. He never held the paper. The deed to his own farm did not exist yet.

So on 8 September 1873 the court ordered the deed made out to his children instead, and ten days later Henry Brannon, Special Commissioner, wrote it. It is the only document in this entire archive that names them all at once, in one breath, with the daughters’ husbands attached:

William H. Hall, Sarah E. A. Lovett wife of Norman H. Lovett, Mary M. Bailey wife of Hezekiah D. Bailey, Minor J. Hall, Richard H. Hall, Virginia B. Hall, Lott Hall, Samuel G. Hall, Nancy L. Hall and Bertha J. Hall — children and heirs at law of James M. Hall, deceased.

Ten. He had eleven children. Rosehorance, born and buried in 1863, is not there — and the silence in a legal instrument that had to be exhaustive is the best proof of that little life we are ever likely to get.

Two of the names carry information nothing else had given us. Sarah is “wife of Norman H. Lovett.” Mary Margaret is “wife of Hezekiah D. Bailey.” Both marriages, dated for the first time to before September 1873 by a clerk who had no idea he was writing for us.

Addison Harvey Hall & Mabel McGinnis

Harvey studied agriculture at Iowa State, served as the county agent in Gilmer County, and by 1919 was running “Harvey's Drug Store” in Weston. In 1934 Lewis County elected him to the West Virginia House of Delegates, and he later ran statewide for Commissioner of Agriculture — one chapter of a real public life that also took in the fair association and church leadership. He married Mabel McGinnis on the fifteenth of December, on the porch of the McGinnis family home in Glenville — the wedding photograph survives, and so does his graduation portrait and his campaign card. The year is the one thing the sources argue about: the family tree book dates the photograph 1915; West Virginia’s marriage index, and Harvey’s own campaign biography printed in 1936, both say 15 December 1918, Gilmer County. Day and month agree everywhere. This page goes with the state register and the man himself, and keeps the book’s year on file.

Harvey died in October 1946. The farm passed to his only son, James Hamlin Hall; his daughters received cash bequests toward college — an arrangement the family would echo a generation later. Mabel outlived him by thirty-three years. After his death she went to live with her daughter Marjorie in Richmond, coming back to the farm each summer through the mid-1960s for berry-picking and jam-making; her grandchildren called Myrl Stalnaker grandma and Mabel grandmother, and understood the difference. She and all three of her daughters were members of the DAR. She died on 4 December 1979 in Manatee County, Florida, and was brought home — cremated, which the family found a little shocking, and interred, her granddaughter Deb remembers, in the family cemetery on the hill near Mt. Morris church; her memorial says Weston. Both are on file.

“By whom employed? — M. J. Hall”

Harvey registered for the draft twice: once at twenty-six, in June 1917, and again at fifty, in the 1942 registration of older men. Read side by side, the two cards are a working life in nine questions.

In 1917 the clerk asked his trade and he said farmer. Asked who employed him, he gave a name: M. J. Hall — his own father, Minor James, then sixty-four. It is the only document in this archive that puts the two of them in an explicit working relationship. The registrar wrote him down as tall, slender, light blue eyes, light brown hair, and he signed at the bottom in a looping confident hand.

By 1942 every one of those answers had changed, and each change is a piece of the life he lived in between — Iowa State, Harvey's Drug Store in Weston, the Fair Association, a run for State Commissioner of Agriculture. The 1942 card asks for his employer's name and he writes only Farmer: he works for himself now. Place of business, Freemans Creek. Person who will always know your address, Mrs. Mabel Hall. And, on line four, the small domestic fact that survives everything else — the telephone at the farm: Freemansburg 234.

He had four years to live.

His Mark

On the first day of September 1946 he sent for a lawyer and made his will. It runs to three pages of the county will book, and it is careful in a way that tells you he knew what was coming.

The farm went to his only son. “I give, devise and bequeath unto my son… home farm in Freeman’s Creek District, Lewis County, West Virginia, together with all the machinery and equipment and livestock thereon.” James Hamlin was twenty-one.

The daughters got money. A cash sum to Marjorie Ann. Five thousand dollars to Mabel Jane. The residue — everything else, real and personal — split five ways between his wife, his three daughters and his son, share and share alike. This is the bargain the family has described for eighty years, set down in his own instrument.

And one clause is pure foresight. Mabel Jane was nineteen. So he wrote it both ways: if she had turned twenty-one by the time he died, the five thousand was hers outright; if she had not, it went to her mother in trust — to manage and invest with “all and the same powers… which she would have if she were the absolute owner thereof”, no bond required — and to be handed over whole “when my said daughter, Mabel Jane Hall, reaches the age of twenty-one years.”

He died on 28 October. She was still twenty. The trust took effect.

It is the same problem the Lewis County court had solved for his own father seventy-three years earlier — a child, an inheritance, and a wait until twenty-one. In 1873 a judge appointed a guardian for nineteen-year-old Minor. In 1946 Minor’s son saw it coming and wrote the answer into his will himself.

His brother Blonda was named executor, and no bond required of him either.

Then look at the bottom of the page.

There is no signature. There is the formula a clerk uses when a man cannot write his own name: the word his above, the word mark below, and between them an X.

his
Harvey A. ✗ Hall  (SEAL)
mark

He was not an unlettered man. He had gone to Iowa State. He ran a drug store in Weston, took a neighbour to law over sixty-seven dollars and saw it through, and in 1934 was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates. He signed both of his draft cards in his own hand — the 1917 one in a looping, confident script you can see a few paragraphs above.

Twenty-nine years later he could not hold the pen.

He made his mark on the first of September and he was dead on the twenty-eighth of October. The will was proved at the courthouse in Weston on 15 November 1946.

How the Ground Was Got

Everything on this page begins at an auction.

In the spring of 1869 a tangled estate case was working through the Circuit Court of Lewis County, and a farm went up for sale to satisfy it. James Monroe Hall bought it for $2,560 — “about two hundred and forty five acres… situate on the West Fork River… known as the ‘Westfield tract’” — and the court confirmed the sale that November. It was not inherited and it was not granted. He bid on it and paid cash.

Four years later he was dead, and the deed had never been written. The clerk had to record it in the file: “having departed this life intestate before the execution to him of a deed.” The land went instead, by court order, to his ten surviving children by name.

Chain of Title

From there the ground narrows toward the farm that stands on it now.

The 888¾ acres of 1878 were never going to stay together; ten heirs became dozens of descendants, and land sold, traded and married away across two generations. What survived into living memory is the part that came down the direct line. Harvey owned the farm until his death in 1946; it passed whole to his only son James Hamlin, who deeded its two tax parcels into his own name in 1948 and 1959, with cash bequests to his sisters in lieu of any interest — the bargain the family’s own written history describes. At his death in 1981 it passed to Deborah, Catherine and Steve, subject to Patricia’s dower — the same instrument, a century later, that had kept Elizabeth Catherine in the house in 1878. Around 1985 the family placed it in the James H. Hall Trust, where it remains: 2547 Valley Chapel Rd, two parcels, 267⅔ acres, Freemans Creek Rural District — Ian and Logan today holding their late father’s third between them.

A hundred and sixteen years from a courthouse auction to a family trust, on the same water.