Hall Jackson Kelley (February 24, 1790 – January 20, 1874) was an American settler and writer from New England known for his strong advocacy for settlement by the United States of the Oregon Country in the 1820s and 1830s. A native of New Hampshire, he was a school teacher in Maine and Massachusetts, and a longtime resident of the latter state after graduating from Harvard College. In 1834 Kelley led an expedition to Oregon Country. He became ill in the Northwest and was virtually deported by the head of the Hudson's Bay Company district office at Fort Vancouver. After his return to Massachusetts, he continued to write about the territory to encourage its settlement, also submitting materials to Congress. In 1868 he published a book about the region, by which time the emigrants on the Oregon Trail had already numbered into the tens of thousands. Kelley Point Park in Portland, Oregon, is named for him, as he had encouraged settlement at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. Early years Hall Kelley was born in Northwood, New Hampshire, on February 24, 1790. He left school and began teaching in Hallowell, Maine, at the age of 16. He graduated from Middlebury in Vermont in 1814 with an A.M. degree, and then graduated from Harvard College in 1820. Kelley also worked as school principal in Boston from 1818-1823. On May 4, 1815, he married Mary Baldwin, daughter of a minister. Career Kelley worked as a railroad surveyor in Maine. He also helped design a project for a canal from Boston to the Connecticut River, which was never built. He designed a railroad between Veracruz, Veracruz, and Mexico City. As early as 1815, after reading about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the expedition by Wilson Price Hunt, Kelley became interested in U.S. settlement of the area west of the Rocky Mountains. He tried to organize a group expedition overland to that region in 1828, but they could not get the funds for outfitting. He followed that effort with a failed attempt to colonize the Puget Sound area with an ocean-based expedition. Also in 1828, he persuaded the Massachusetts Legislature to charter a society to promote U.S. settlement along the Columbia River. At the time, the Oregon Country was under joint administration of the U.S. and Great Britain pursuant to the Anglo-American Convention of 1818. Effectively the area was under control of