Lyman Hall

Lyman Hall was an American physician, planter, and statesman who signed the Declaration of Independence as one of three delegates from Georgia. Born in 1724 in Wallingford, Connecticut, the son of a farmer, he graduated from Yale College in 1747 and trained briefly for the Congregationalist ministry before turning to medicine.

In the early 1750s Hall moved south with a group of Connecticut Puritans who settled at Dorchester in South Carolina, and around 1760 the community relocated to the parish of St John in coastal Georgia, founding the town of Sunbury and the rice and indigo district of Midway. Hall practised medicine, ran a plantation worked by enslaved labourers, and represented the parish in colonial affairs.

When most of Georgia hesitated to join the rebellion against Britain, the parish of St John acted alone and sent Hall to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, where Georgia's other parishes joined a year later. He signed the Declaration of Independence on 2 August 1776 alongside Button Gwinnett and George Walton. British forces overran his Georgia estate in 1778 and burned his home, and he spent the later war years in the North.

After the war he returned to Georgia and was elected governor in 1783, serving a one-year term during which he urged the founding of a state university, an effort that led in 1785 to the chartering of the University of Georgia. He died in 1790 on his Burke County plantation.

The name Lyman is an English surname turned given name, from the Old English leah-mann, meaning man of the meadow. He carried it as a masculine name used in colonial New England.