Obituary: David Martin Hall

As received from the Pearce Funeral Home:

David Martin Hall, age 71, passed away peacefully in his sleep on 10 August 2024. He is survived by his wife, Dana Van Kooy, his son, Dillon Hall, and his wife, Haley Hall, his mother, Camille Carstens, his two brothers, Brad and Bob Hall, his sister, Amy Hartman, and an extended family, including Janet and Jerome Crawford, their sons, Spencer and Miles Crawford, nieces and nephews and dear friends living in the Houghton-Hancock area of Michigan and in the Boulder-Nederland area of Colorado. He is preceded in death by his father, John W. Hall, and his two nephews, R.J. Hartman and Alex Hartman.

David was born in Roswell, New Mexico. After graduating high school, he moved north to attend Colorado State University in Fort Collins, where he studied Anthropology. After graduating, he worked as a field archaeologist. He worked on digs throughout the Western United States, many of which were focused on Clovis-tool-making culture; he also worked at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. During this period, he travelled throughout Latin America when not working in the field.

Returning to Colorado, he settled in Nederland, where helped start and manage the natural foods store, Mountain People’s Coop. While living in a teepee, he became an avid gardener, known for growing greens and garlic. He also started building his house. Knowing very little about carpentry at the time, he started with the foundation because he knew how to dig. He then collected building materials to reuse, including a bowling-alley floor that became a beautiful countertop. Years later, he took an interest in watches and clocks and eventually repaired clocks professionally in the Boulder/Denver area.

In 2014, he and his wife, Dana moved to Houghton, MI, where she had accepted a faculty position in the Humanities Department at Michigan Technological University. Since then, he has stridently advocated with the Copper Country Recycling Initiative (CCRI), for curbside recycling and for crosswalks. He has created a beautiful home and garden. When not blowing snow, he can be seen outside in the morning watering the gardens, chasing chipmunks away from the blueberries, feeding the birds, chatting with neighbors, and encouraging passersby to pick freely from the garden. In recent years, he found great joy in travelling, especially to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he loved to ramble around the city and its many parks for hours every day. He wrote beautifully about these travels to family and friends.

In lieu of flowers, please vote in local and national elections and advocate for sustainability, education, peace, and justice. As he wrote in a family email some years ago, “Do something good in your own neighborhood/community to spread love.” He believed that the organization, Doctors without Borders does some of the hardest work in the world (https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/secure/donate). He donated regularly, often anonymously.  

The Pearce Funeral Home in Lake Linden is assisting the family.  Online condolences maybe shared at pearcefuneralhome.com