INDEX TO
BIOGRAPHIES
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS
| There are many curious developments in a study of American history wherever you begin. One particularly interesting thing is that the sons of Austin Wilbur Hall by Corolin Fisk his first wife are relatives not very remote of Senator Stephen A. Douglas who invited the American people to move into Kansas Territory and fight it out among themselves as to whether or not they should have slavery. Corolin Fisk was a remarkable woman who is affectionately remembered by the very few of her generation yet living. She came from a very old English family who had their homestead at the Manor of Stadhaugh, Parish of Laxfield in County Suffolk, where Lord Lyman Fiske was lord of the manor from 1399 to 1422. They had fine old historic places, some still preserved to this day and a coat of arms to stimulate their pride. In 1637 scions of this family came to America and developed a wonderful progeny, as nearly every American Fisk is recorded in their family book. They have been wonderful pioneers, powerful preachers, and great doctors of medicine. They all took to higher education and many were graduates of Harvard. One of the Fisk women married a Scotchman of the rather proud name of Douglas, a name famous in the land of cakes. To her was born at the family home in Vermont a son who was named Stephen Arnold and he got into the United States Senate from Illinois and took a strenuous part in the public affairs of his time. He was of the same generation and only a little older than this remote cousin Corolin Fisk of Eden, Vermont, who became the wife of Austin W. Hall and made her home at Trading Post. I am unable to give the genealogy of Mr. Hall, whose American ancestry goes back beyond 1800, but they have left a monument to themselves in their sons, as follows:
(History of Linnn County, by William Ansel Mitchell, 1928, Pages 362-363) |