Francis Hall (1822–1902) was an upstate New York book dealer who went to Japan in 1859 and became the founder of Walsh, Hall and Co., America's leading trading house in 19th-century Japan.Ernest Satow, Records of a Diplomat, Tokyo: Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 27. Satow wrote that it was the "leading American firm" in Yokohama when he arrived in 1862. See also M. Paske Smith, Western Barbarians in Japan and Formosa in Tokugawa Days ,1863–1868 (Kobe: J.L.Thompson & Co. 1930), p. 266. Harold S. Williams writes: "Walsh, Hall & Co. was doing an enormous business; the partners were looked upon as merchant princes, and everyone recognized it as ranking among the No. 1 American firms.: See Foreigners in Mikadoland (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E Tuttle & Co., 1963, p.204 Hall served as Japan correspondent for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate, publishing nearly 70 articles in the Tribune. While in Japan he kept a detailed journal that has become a major source on life in Japan during the middle of the 19th century.Hall's Journal and New York Tribune articles have been published by F.G. Notehelfer of UCLA in Japan Through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, Kanagawa and Yokohama, 1859–1866. (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992),() pp. 1–652. This work also includes an extensive sketch of Hall's life. An abridged paperback version of the journal has been published as Japan Through American Eyes, The Journal of Francis Hall, 1859–1866 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2001),() pp. 1–465. Having made a fortune in trade between Japan and the United States he returned home in 1866 and became a philanthropist and world traveler.
Early life Francis (Frank) Hall was born the sixth son in a family of sixteen children in Ellington Connecticut on October 27, 1822.For further biographical details see Ausburn Towner, "Francis Hall," in Our County and its People. A History of the Valley and County of Chemung; From the Closing years of the Eighteenth Century (Syracuse, N.Y.: D Mason & Co., 1892) pp 628–39. There is also a family genealogy in the Hall Family Papers at the Chemung County Historical Society , Elmira, N.Y, as well as at the Hall Memorial Library, Ellington, Conn. His father, John Hall (1783–1847), a Yale graduate (1802), founded one of the nation's premiere preparatory academies, the Ellington School, in 1829.see "John Hall" in David Field, comp., Yale University Class of 1802 (New Haven, Conn,: Privately Printed, 1863), p. 67. John Hall was often known as "Judge Hall" because of his service in the County Court, he was politically minded and served in the Connecticut Legislature (1815 and 1819) and was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1817. The Ellington School continued until 1839 when the elder Hall retired.The Ellington School is described in "Early Ellington Village, From the Middle 1700s – Through 1915," Assembled and printed by the Calendar Staff, the Congregational Church, Ellington, Conn., December 1952, unp. Also "Ellington Goes to School," typescript, pp. 1–4, and "Notes of Interest About the Hall Schools," typescript, pp. 1–2. All these pamphlets can be found in the Hall Memorial Library, Ellington, Conn. But the family's role in education was continued by Frank's older brother, Edward, who established the Hall Family School for Boys in 1844.This school is described in "Notes of Interest About the Hall Schools," Hall Memorial Library, Ellington, Conn. This was an exclusive school that took no more than twelve students annually. Years later, in 1872, Frank Hall was instrumental in sending Iwasaki Yanosuke, the man who came to head the Mitsubishi Corporation and later the Baron Iwasaki, to his brother's school in Ellington.Iwasaki Yanosuke was the younger brother of Iwasaki Yataro, the founder of the Mitsubishi enterprises. As his journal shows, Hall had a boy servant by name of Iwasaki in 1860. It is possible that this boy was Yanosuke, who was born in 1851, and would have been nine or ten at the time. Yanosuke studied with Edward Hall for over a year in 1873–74; he took over the Mitsubishi Zaibatsu in 1885 after the death of his brother, Yataro. He later became the Baron Iwasaki, and when Hall built the Hall Memorial Library in 1902–03, the Baron and his wife contributed $2000 toward the project to commemorate his learning experiences at Edward's school in Ellington. See New York Tribune Dec. 6, 1903, pt. 2, p. 14.
Hall graduated from the Ellington School in 1838. The financial panic of 1837 made it impossible for him to attend Yale, so he took up a career of teaching school. By 1842 he had given up teaching and moved to Elmira, New York, where he opened the town's first book store.After clerking in a book store in Syracuse, Hall arrived in Elmira with a wagon load of books he had purchased for $500 with a loan from his brother Levi Wells and set up shop on Water Street in May 1842. Hall became a successful book dealer and a cultural figure in the community.Hall became something of a promoter of literary men in the town and at his own risk brought to Elmira some of America's leading writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edwin Percy Whipple, Bayard Taylor, Horace Mann, J.G. Saxe, Oliver Wendel Holmes and E.H. Parker. It is not known how well he knew Elmira's best known writer, Mark Twain, but by the 1850s Hall's bookstore had become the meeting place for local intellectuals and writers that included abolitionist such as Thomas K. Beecher the brother of Henry Ward Beecher. Towner, Our County, p. 631. In 1846 he married Sarah Covell the daughter of Miles Covell one of Elmira's most prominent citizens.Letter from Francis Hall to Edward Hall dated Elmira, N.Y., August 17, 1846, Hall Family Papers, Chemung County Historical Society, Elmira, N.Y. Unfortunately, Sarah died two years later in 1848. Troubled by his wife's death, Hall thought of leaving Elmira, but could find no buyer for his store. For the next decade he busied himself in the life of the community and served for a time as the elected president of the Board of Trustees of Elmira, which was the equivalent of serving as mayor of the city.Towner, Our County, p. 633. Hall achieved a number of important things as Mayor which included the establishment of a free school system, and the creation of one of America's first "mortuary parks," the Woodlawn Cemetery, designed by the renowned New York landscape architect, Howard Daniels. He also showed his calm good sense by heading off a potential race riot over an escaped black slave who had been brought to Elmira on the underground railroad.
Travel to Japan In 1859, after selling his business to his two brothers Frederic and Charles C.,The bookstore was renamed "HallBrothers" and by 1863 had added Robert A. to the original two. Hall Brothers remained in business until 1879. Hall decided to join Samuel Robbins Brown, Guido Verbeck, and Duane B. Simmons, three Dutch Reformed Board missionaries, on a trip to Japan.Samuel Robbins Brown had been a teacher and missionary in China from 1839 to 1847. Guido F. Verbeck was a recent immigrant from the Netherlands. Duane B. Simmons was a young doctor. All were sent to Japan by the Dutch Reformed Board. They, along with James Curtis Hepburn, a doctor and renowned Japanese dictionary author, were among the first missionaries to return to Japan after the proscription of Christianity in the 17th century. For a biography of Brown see William Elliot Griffis, A Maker of the New Orient: Samuel Robbins Brown, (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1902) pp. 1–332; for a biography of Verbeck see William Elliot Griffis, Verbeck of Japan: A Citizen of no Country, (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1900), pp. 1–376. Simmons later left the church mission, but remained active in Japan as a medical physician and teacher. Hall had worked with Brown in the creation of Elmira College, one of the nation's first female institutions of higher learning.Plans for what became Elmira College were first made in 1851 at the Second Dutch Reformed Church at Albany which was pastored by the Rev. Isaac N. Wycoff. The goal was to establish a high quality institution of higher education for women. The school opened in 1855. S.R. Brown headed the school's founding board. Hall later served on the college's board for twenty-five years. Hall had also been close to Bayard Taylor, America's premier travel writer, who had visited Elmira at Hall's invitation on the Lyceum Circuit. Taylor had gone to Japan with the Perry expedition in 1854 and had covered the expedition for Horace Greeley's Tribune.Hearing of the Perry Expedition Taylor rushed to China and used his political connections to become part of the Expedition. Perry strictly controlled all publications referring to the Expedition (including Bayard Taylor's letters to the Tribune) and confiscated all private journals of those who went. Taylor used his excellent memory to scoop the Expedition's official account by publishing his own book, A Visit to India, China, and Japan, in the Year 1853 (New York: G.P. Putnam & Co., 1855) a year before the official Perry volumes came out. It seems that Taylor served as an intermediary to Greeley who decided to hire Hall as the Tribune’s Japan correspondent.
Hall took up residence in Kanagawa on November 1, 1859, among a mere handful of Westerners then residing in the new Treaty Port (Kanagawa-Yokohama). His seven years in Japan covered the most momentous period, during which the old feudal regime gave way to the forces that made the Meiji Restoration. Constantly surrounded by violence and the threat of violence, Hall remained remarkably calm and collected. His journal records the life of the treaty port in great detail. Hall quickly learned Japanese with some of the best students of the age, J.C. Hepburn, the great missionary scholar being one of the men with whom he studied.James Curtis Hepburn was an outstanding missionary scholar who is best known for his translations of scripture, developing the first major English-Japanese Dictionary, and creating the system of romanizing Japanese that still bear's his name. For a biography see William Elliott Griffis, Hepburn of Japan (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1913), pp. 1–238. Consequently, what Hall recorded was not only the daily life of Westerners, but much of the daily life of the Japanese around him. Ethnographer, demographer, sports writer, social observer, economist, agronomist, diplomat, personal participant in momentous events, Hall left a remarkable portrait of Japan and the Japanese in his daily observations. In addition, Hall was interested in photography and a serious student of Japanese plants. He was a friend of George R. Hall, Robert Fortune and Philipp Franz von Siebold—all major "plant hunters." Hall sent some of the first Japanese lilies to the U.S., which were sold at his brothers’ bookstore in Elmira.See Elmira Daily Advertiser April 4, 1863, for an advertisement for Hall Bros. Book Store announcing the sale of a shipment of several dozen bulbs of "The Golden lily of Japan" [lilium auratum]-- The Most Beautiful of all Known Lilies," which were being sold from "fifty cents to one dollar" per bulb.