ROGER LIVINGSTON HALL - 1869-1935

Roger Livingston Hall was the youngest child of John A. and Martha Susan Jeffries Hall. He was a brother of my great-grandmother Louise Hall.

My mother remembered little family bits about Roger -- that he lived in Oklahoma and was a senator or “somebody political,” she said. Mother’s half-cousin Verne in Kansas told me he was a doctor but mainly worked with the Indians and became very wealthy because of some tie-in with oil that the Indians owned. Those were just little bits of the story. Whether they were true or not I probably will never know. But in a story written by his daughter Martha and printed in an Osage County (OK) Historical Society publication in 1964, I read the following:

LuLu Maud Murphy [future wife of Roger] was born in Missouri and later she moved with her parents to both Kansas and California. She graduated from the Southwest institute in San Diego (now the University of Southern California) and moved to Caldwell, Kansas with her parents where she took a teaching position.

While staying with Mrs. Richmond [Nancy E.] LuLu met her youngest brother, Roger Hall, who entertained her with the stories of his life as a rider on the Chisholm Trail. They began an engagement that lasted four years while he studied at the Missouri Medical School in St. Louis (Now Washington University). He graduated in 1894 and they married in 1895.

When he made the ‘run’ in the 1893 Cherokee Strip Opening, he staked his claim on land he saw and desired while driving cattle on the Trail. It joined what was to become the town of Medford, OK. It was to a cozy house he built there that he took his bride. A country doctor’s life was hard in those early days with no hospital nearer than Wichita, Kansas. Drought and depression followed in the ‘90s, making life even more difficult. My father’s health broke, and he was forced to go to Colorado to recuperate.

Uncle Frank Frantz, the Indian Agent in Pawhuska and later Territorial governor of Oklahoma was instrumental in bringing my parents and brother, Livingston, to Osage County in 1904. In Pawhuska two more children were born – Edmund and Martha….

My father took an active part in organizing the town of Pawhuska. He built the first brick building. Instead of practicing medicine, he turned to cattle raising, and acquired a large ranch west of Pawhuska which he sold in 1917 to the Santa Fe Railroad. Later there were other ranches and farms. My father was elected to the Oklahoma State Senate in 1916.”

According to Martha’s article, all three of Roger’s children were college educated. Son Livingston served as Osage County Treasurer and died in Pawhuska in 1974. Edmund ranched with his father until Roger’s death in 1935 and then ranched in Pershing until he himself died in 1968. And daughter Martha Hall Lloyd, writer of the article, graduated from Wellesley and taught until her marriage.



Obituary from Blackwell Morning Tribune, April 24, 1935.

A descendant of Bessie Hall Richmond (Roger's other sister) sent me a photocopied portrait of John A. Hall holding his grandson Livingston, Roger’s oldest boy who was born in December of 1899.