Bolton Hall

Bolton Hall (August 5, 1854 – December 10, 1938) was an American lawyer, author, and Georgism activist who worked on behalf of the poor and started the back-to-the-land movement in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1875, he was graduated from Princeton University (where he rowed crew).

Career Hall was a prolific writer of books and pamphlets.

Around 1886, Hall was a member of the export firm of McCarty and Hall, which failed that year. He filed for bankruptcy but withdrew the action after settling with creditors.

Activism Hall was active on behalf of various progressive movements. He was an admirer of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, French politician, philosopher and socialist, of Benjamin R. Tucker, editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty, and Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, pacifist and Christian anarchist. He was opposed to Marxism and agreed with classical liberal political theorist Herbert Spencer, who called it "the coming slavery."

Before 1908 he established the Vacant Lot Gardening Association in New York City, which grew to "about 200 members" who "conducted a number of experiments in and near New York during its existence." One of them included the use of 30 acres of land on Bronxdale Avenue, near White Plains Road, "which the Astor estate had allowed us to use and on which a number of families had been living." Afterward, the association used property on Dyckman Street near Prescott Avenue, not for cultivation, but for the establishment of a tent city. The difficulty in getting free land for "vacant lot gardening" led Hall to establish the Little Land League, whose idea was to buy property no more than 90 minutes from New York for a training school, "and the people who have proved capable there we shall put on their feet as farmers on a larger piece of land further away." In 1909 he made a trip to Europe to study vacant-lot gardening.

In 1910 he deeded some of land to establish the egalitarian community of Free Acres in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, under which the residents pay only a single tax on land values to the community, which, in turn, pays a lump sum to the city. Improvements such as buildings were not to be taxed, but only the value of the land.

On June 5, 1916, he was arrested along with Ida Rauh on a misdemeanor charge of distributing pamphlets on birth control at a public meeting in Manhattan's Union Square on May 20 of that year.

He was a disciple of Henry George and one of the leading exponents of the single-tax theory. He was opposed to Tammany Hall, the organization that dominated the political life of the city in the early 20th century. He founded the New York Tax Reform Association. and they had a son, John Hoyt Hall, who died at 14 in 1911, and one daughter, Lois, who later married Gerard P. Herrick.

After providing for his wife and daughter, Hall bequeathed his residuary estate and $2,000 to the Henry George School of Social Science in New York City, to which he had contributed generously.