Person:Samuel Hall (4)

[SUTTON BIRTHS]
p 79 - HALL, Samuel Read, s. Stephen and Sarah, Jan 21, 1755.

SAMUEL READ HALL, the first Congregational minister in Rumford, was born in Sutton, Mass., January, 21, 1755. He was the son of Stephen and Mary [sic] (Taft) Read Hall, and a descendant of John Hall of Medford, Mass., in 1675, and in Cambridge in 1652, and who was born in England in 1627. When a young man Samuel R. Hall went to Croyden, Vt., and then to Guildhall, where he resided several years. The people here were destitute of preaching, and Mr. Hall exhorted, conducted prayer meetings, and finally decided to go into the ministry. Just what time he arrived in Rumford does not appear, but probably about the year 1807. A vote was passed in town meeting in 1811, to extend a call to Rev. Samuel R. Hall to become the minister of the town at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars, sixty to be paid in money and the balance in produce. Mr. Hall's wife was Elizabeth, daughter of Hezekiah Hall, and she died in Guildhall, Vt., June 14, 1806. Mr. Hall died in Rumford in 1814. Most of his family remained in Vermont. His son, Samuel Read Hall, Jr., came to Rumford and was teaching school in town in 1816. He became a famous teacher and introduced many improved methods of imparting instruction, one of which was the use of the black-board, which was used for the first time in an American school, in a district school in Rumford taught by Mr. Hall in 1816. This fact is stated in the Hall Genealogy, and the writer of this volume also heard it from the lips of Abel Wheeler of Rumford, who was a teacher in this town contemporaneous with Mr. Hall. The children of Rev. Samuel R. Hall were: ...

Samuel R. Hall, probably came to Croyden, to see about some land owned by his father, and settled there as a farmer. He held the offices of constable, collector, tithingman, moderator etc., and was a soldier from that town in the revolutionary war. He had surveyed in 1794, some of the eastern townships of Canada, and purchased the half of one of them, of fraudulent parties, and on Jan. 20, 1796, he started from Croydon, with his family, to go to Canada and take possession of his purchase, and proceeded as far as Guildhall, Vt., before he knew of the fraud. The swindlers had been paid, and Mr. Hall found himself in Guildhall (which was nearly a wilderness at that time), without the means to make any more purchases. He lived in Guildhall several years, and was a great spiritual blessing to the town; the people were destitute of the preached gospel, and Mr. Hall gathered them together and conducted prayer meetings, with exhortations, and his gifts and usefulness, appeared to justify his becoming a preacher of the gospel, and he was accordingly ordained as a Congregational minister. In 1807, he removed to Rumford, Me., where he was the means of gathering a church, and became its pastor, and continued such until his death. Mrs. Hall was a feeble woman in the later years of her life.