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Updated
November 7, 2012
JAMES HALL OF ALBANY GEOLOGIST AND PALAEONTOLOGIST 1811-1898
BY JOHN M. CLARKE
ALBANY 1921
[Pages 235 -6]
Amidst all the various activities of these years Mr. Hall was busied in developing his new Beaverkill property on the outskirts of the city. He was still setting out ornamental and fruit trees and in planning his new estate he had engaged the aid of Downing and Vaux of New York; Andrew J. Downing and Calvert Vaux, the most distinguished of American rural artists. Downing and Vaux had laid out the parking of the Capitol and the Smithsonian at Washington, and after the death of Mr. Downing, Mr. Vaux planned and developed many important public works; the Central Park enlargement. Prospect Park, Riverside and Morn- ingside Parks and the Niagara Falls Reservation. While engaged for Mr. Hall, Mr. Downing was drowned in 1852, in the burning of the Hudson River steamer " Henry Clay," on which he was a passenger...
On this estate Hall had built a red brick retreat in which he assembled all the personnel and paraphernalia of his work. It was a spreading one story structure with one large room and galleries for his collections assembled in some thousands of drawers, with a study framed in books. Not long after, he removed his family to a dwelling on the place and some twenty-five years later built another more elaborate house nearer to his brick " office," but during many years this red office was his real home. Here he worked and slept and here his associates labored from the time of the arrival of Mr. Meek, the first of this long retinue. Mr. Hall's property is now a part of a public park, first appropriately named Beaver Park, from the Beaverkill which had cut a gorge through its upper reaches, but now
rechristened Lincoln Park by a patriotic but un- imaginative Common Council. The dwellings are gone but the brick office remains; and under a
promise from the city that it shall continue to stay, it has been marked by a tablet carrying this inscription:This Building was Erected by
JAMES HALL
State Geologist of New York
1836-1898
For nearly fifty years it served as his office and
laboratory and from it graduated many geologists
of merit and distinction. During most of that
period it was an influential and active centre of
geological science in this country.Placed by The Association of American State Geologists 1916
