ABSTRACT
Francis Hall was born in Ellington, Connecticut, on October 27, 1822. The sixth son in a family of sixteen children, he spent his early years on the family's farm. Like the Deacon Hall, Francis's father John Hall was a man of considerable education and local influence. In 1825, John Hall founded a coeducational academy that emphasized classical studies. If the Hall schools made Ellington into a center of "culture and learning," as a local history notes, they also provided the environment in which Francis Hall matured. In keeping with John Hall's ideas on education, life at the Ellington School was starkly austere. It appears that Francis Hall completed his course of study at the Ellington School in 1838. Hall's ambivalence about staying on in Elmira in the wake of Sarah's death seems to have been partially overcome in the early 1850s by his renewed commitment to his work. In summer 1858, Hall was confronted by a highly explosive situation.
