Students who wanted to attend the new university wrote to a realtor out of Moore Haven, Daniel Lence, to buy land in the burgeoning community.

"[1] Traveling to Moore Haven from Arcadia was considered "a full day's hard trip," though having the Hall City hotel as a rest stop.

After falling ill from exhaustion in the early 1890s, Hall, his wife and two sons, Paul and Barton, lived in Chicago during the time of the World's Fair, an event he wrote about in articles submitted to various Disciples-oriented publications, while he pastored a small congregation.

Hall left Chicago and took a position in Decatur, Illinois, at a Disciples church, where his preaching and methods eventually resulted in a split of the congregation.

Hall was rather unusual in that, while preaching, he spent a great deal of time developing side businesses and investments as well as becoming a published author on Christian themes.

Dr. Hall (by 1910 he had earned some sort of degree at a local Bible College in the Chicago area) began to look for other business opportunities in the South.

According to some of the sermons published by Dr. Hall towards the end of 1909, he had had big plans for his Chicago congregation, including the building of a massive church building that would have included "baths" and a treatment facility for people with epilepsy (his eldest son was one), but apparently the congregation must not have agreed with him, as he retired in 1910 from the ministry and devoted himself to pursuing yet another land deal, this time in Florida.

His various business projects had failed and his son Barton was told at the funeral by George's brother, a Federal Judge in Iowa, that his father had died bankrupt."

Bart loaded up a Ford Model A customized as a camper and traveled about the Midwest to visit various relatives before heading down to Florida to begin the process of carving a town out of the palmetto scrub in what was certainly a pioneer area of the State.

According to other pictures taken during this early period, Bart spent time in Fort Myers, Florida and took sightseeing trips to the Everglades to see the Seminole Indians.

Hall, various relatives and a girlfriend from Chicago wrote letters and postcards to Bart, detailing business issues and family problems; Rev.

Hall wrote about successes and failures on the road trying to drum up investors and possible inhabitants of the new town, while an aunt in Kansas detailed their problems with Bart's older brother, who was in a "foul air" during the Christmas of 1911, but continued, in her mind, to make progress despite his severe disabilities.

Wendell later became a well-known songwriter and entertainer in the 1920s, being mainly remembered today for popularizing the tune "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'".

"[1] As World War I approached, land sales and profits for Hall City shrank and Bart had to move to Jacksonville for a time to work for a company building concrete barges.

Hall died in Chicago in February, 1925 of heart disease, with some questions being raised as to the legality of the land sales and calls for a criminal investigation by some of the investors.

When Bart traveled to Chicago he was taken aside by his uncle, a Federal Judge in Iowa and his brother Wendell, by now a famous entertainer and recording artist, and was told that his father was bankrupt and that he would receive nothing from the estate.

In fact, Wendell had to purchase the family house on the courthouse steps in a sale to be able to salvage some of the furniture and possessions to be able to resettle his mother in Lawrence, Kansas.