Lake County IN Archives Biographies.....Ball, T. H. 1826 - ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/in/infiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com January 3, 2007, 11:40 pm Author: T. H. Ball (1904) A LIFE OUTLINE. T. H. BALL, recognized as the historian of Lake county, Indiana, has had quite an eventful life, the full details of which would make more than a small volume. A comparatively brief outline is all that can here be given. Birthplace, Name, Lineage. He was born February 16, 1826, at the home of Dr. Timothy Horton, his mother's father, in the present town of Agawam, then West Springfield, Massachusetts. At this date only about six weeks of the second quarter of the grand nineteenth century had passed, and in a few months from this date took place the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of this nation and the death of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Only one president had died before he was born. John Quincy Adams was then president. It was a favorable period in which to begin life, and some very pleasant circumstances were around him. Through his father, at that time a lawyer in the state of Georgia, near Augusta, he is the seventh in descent from Francis Ball, of West Springfield, who was, according to the late researches of the Ball International Union, one of six brothers who came from England between 1630 and 1650. Through his mother he is a descendant of the Hortons from England, a great-grandson of Dr. Timothy Horton, Sr., who was born in Springfield or West Springfield in 1726, and probably the seventh in descent from Thomas Horton, of Springfield, a settler in 1638. Also through his mother, Jane Ayrault (Aro) Horton, and his grandmother, Elizabeth Hanmer, daughter of James Hanmer, he is a descendant of the English Hanmers, an early branch of which family settled in Connecticut; and through his great-grandmother, Elizabeth Ayrault, of Wethersfield, he is a descendant of Dr. Nicholas Ayrault, a Huguenot refugee of about 1681, who settled in Rhode Island and married Marian or Mary Ann Breton, daughter of a prosperous Huguenot merchant of the south of France, so that through these, from whom he is the sixth in descent, he goes back to a line of Huguenots who were in good circumstances in life, who possessed physical endurance, and who clung tenaciously to their religious faith. Perhaps some of that tenacity came down, by what is now called a law of heredity, to their Indiana descendant, for Dr. Higgins, of Crown Point, once remarked of him that he had a bull-dog tenacity of purpose. Going back now to his grandmother Ball, who was a daughter of John Miller and Hepzibah Chapin, he is the eighth in descent from Deacon Samuel Chapin, an early settler in Springfield, a noted man in Puritan church life, a man highly esteemed, who in 1652 was "appointed one of the magistrates of Springfield." It thus appears that the child born in Agawam in 1826 had four well established lines of Puritan and English ancestry—the Ball, Horton, Hanmer and Chapin lines—and one well-known Huguenot line, so that he would now be quite inexcusable not to have some strong principle. The name given to that child was Timothy Horton, the name of his grandfather, a quite noted physician at that time in West Springfield. The name being rather long, Timothy Horton Ball, he has become accustomed to write it as his ordinary and business signature, T. H. Ball, using as a signature to many of his writings the initials T. H. B., and sometimes the finals Y. N. L. He learned a few years ago that there was and perhaps is still another T. H. Ball in this country who was a corset-maker, but he is very sure that no one else in this entire country can claim the address Rev. T. H. Ball. Different Home Spots. From his grandfather's home in Agawam the young T. H. Ball went with his mother, in the fall of 1828, to his father's home in Columbia county, Georgia, but of that ocean voyage from New York to Savannah he retains no remembrance, his memory reaching back only to himself, his mother, his father, the black servants, and the surroundings of his father's home, in a newly erected house at the county seat of Columbia county. Here he remained, learning as a boy naturally would, one form of life in the south, the native scenery of that part of the south, its social and its religious life as he saw this life, till the late fall of 1833, when he was nearly eight years of age, and then he returned with his mother and a sister and a brother, also with his father, to the town of West Springfield and to his birthplace. There, in looking on the walls of the ancestral home, an object attracting his attention immediately was a painting representing the Horton and Hanmer coats of arms. Whether his English ancestors were really of the families to whom these were originally given he knew not then, he knows not now, but these armorial representations, lions couchant and rampant, had quite an influence upon him. From the fall of 1833 to the spring of 1837 he learned New England life and customs and traditions, as fast as he could grasp them, learned something of the kindred of his father and his mother, and in 1837 the family, then increased by the addition of two Massachusetts brothers, came to Indiana. For a little while in the summer and fall a home was found in the new village of City West, on the shore of Lake Michigan, ten miles west from Michigan City. Here he learned the meaning of frontier life, learned the grandeur of Lake Michigan in storms and its beauty in repose, gained from the tops of the great sand hills an idea of the solitudes of nature, and saw something of Indian life. But he made visits with his father to the prairie region of Lake county in mid-summer, and to that beautiful little lake, the Lake of the Red Cedars, where for the next thirty years the home of the Ball family was to be, and where in December of 1837 the entire family was comfortably domiciled. To this home of lake and prairie beauty his grandmother from New York city soon came and two little Cedar Lake sisters, like prairie birds, also came, making in all, without the domestics, usually two or three in number, ten members of the transplanted New England family. This became the dear home spot, the dearest at length to him of all home spots of earth, where he learned something of farm work, of raising cattle and sheep and hogs, and learned to hunt, and to spear fish, and to swim, and to pole and row and scull a boat, and where the most important experiences and events of his life took place. One more home spot remains to be named, Crown Point, where he established his own home in 1863, and where that home continues to be. Into the Crown Point home at different times many friends and some kindred have gathered, and within its peaceful walls a daughter has been married, a little niece has died, and a grandson has been born. His Mental Training. Of course many ideas had been acquired and quite a little mental training had been carried on by his mother in his first two years of life of which he has no remembrance. He had learned in those years one great lesson, and that was obedience. Of learning to read in his Georgia home he has no distinct recollection. His father, a graduate of Middlebury College, and estimating highly the value of classical studies, had him commence the study of Latin so soon as he could read well and had learned from his mother something of elementary geography and arithmetic and botany. He commenced attending an academy. He had some good teachers, all of them men. He went over the usual spelling and reading lessons of the other pupils but applied himself diligently to his Latin studies. The only certainty as to age at this time is this, that he had committed to memory very largely Adams' Latin grammar, had read a Latin first reader then used called Liber Primus, had read a second book called Viri Romase, and in the fall of 1833 commenced reading in Caesar's Commentaries, when his southern academic life ended. In West Springfield, when eight years of age, in an academic school he continued to read the writings of Caesar. When nine years of age he commenced the study of Greek and continued this with his other studies for two years, having for a portion of this time a private tutor for his Greek. The year 1837 came and classical studies were laid by. At the Cedar Lake home school he pursued English studies as a kind of recreation, applied himself vigorously to arithmetic, surveying and philosophy, doing quite an amount of reading along with some farm work and hunting. He had commenced in Georgia reading poetry, having in his own library "Original Poems for Infant Minds" and Cowper's works, three volumes. To these were added in Agawam "The Poetical Works of Hemans, Heber and Pollok," and in his lake home there came into his hands "Ossian," of which he became intensely fond. Several of the British poets naturally followed in his youth except Shakespeare, for whose writings he never formed a taste. In West Springfield he attended when nine years of age a literary society and acquired there a taste for literary pursuits which was further cultivated by the Cedar Lake Lyceum and the Cedar Lake Belles Lettres Society, which taste has never left him. The time at length came for him to lay aside farm work and hunting and prepare in earnest for college life. Classical studies were resumed in the home at the lake. He read largely and rapidly Caesar and Cicero's orations and Virgil, reading the twelve books of the Aeneid, the Bucolics, and the Georgics, reading the last Georgic, 566 lines, in one June day. Entering Franklin College, Indiana, in 1848, a long ways "in advance" of the regular college course, he graduated in 1850, received the degree of Bachelor of Arts and soon commenced teaching, first, taking charge of the Hendricks County Seminary at Danville, Indiana, and in 1851 becoming principal of the Grove Hill Male and Female Academy of Clarke county, Alabama. Here, as a teacher, he applied himself diligently to the study of English grammar and in a short time, with a few years of teaching, he considered himself well skilled in the three departments of parsing, so-called, of analyzing, and of scanning. In college he had given much attention to the odes of Horace, and he soon found English prosody very attractive. In three years from the time of his graduation he received the degree "in course" of Master of Arts. The time came for another change in studies. In 1860 he entered as a student the Newton Theological Institution near Boston, and there spent three years in close study, having as teachers Dr. H. B. Hackett Dr. Alvah Hovey, and Dr. A. S. Train. He graduated in 1863 and has been cultivating his mental powers ever since. Special Statements. He was received as a member into the Cedar Lake Baptist church April 19, 1845, and on the next day, Sunday, April 20, was baptized according to Baptist custom in the waters of the Red Cedar Lake, on the same day with his oldest sister. He was licensed to preach, also according to Baptist usage, February 8, 1851, at Danville, Indiana. He went to Clarke county, Alabama, in 1851, and was there married, April 19, 1855, to Martha Caroline Creighton, daughter of Rev. Hiram Creighton, of Clarke county, with whom he has now lived for nearly fifty years, and who has nobly filled all the positions which have come to her in life. He was ordained at Crown Point December 30, 1855. He went south in 1858 and remained there till the fall of i860. He settled as pastor at Crown Point in 1863. In 1865 ne established the Crown Point Institute, and erected a good, substantial building, and secured several teachers. August 1, 1871, he sold the land and building to the town of Crown Point for public school purposes, receiving the sum of $3,600. As Publisher. He issued his first publication, a pamphlet on the Immortality of the Soul, in 1861, at Boston, and his first book in 1873, at Crown Point. His largest book, "Clarke and Its Surroundings," pages 774, was published at Grove Hill, Alabama, in 1882. In all he has published thirteen books and six pamphlets, historical, poetical, genealogical, and religious, nearly all sent out from Crown Point. In all, thousands of copies have gone into public and private libraries, and he has paid out thousands of dollars for printing and binding. Most of these publications have brought in some income. Unlike general and large publishers he has issued only his own writings, being at the same time author and publisher. Besides books and pamphlets, he has also published maps, his own maps, and these have been a source of a more considerable income. He also published, at different times, three periodicals, the Castalion, the Prairie Voice, and Our Banner, the latter being for a time the organ of the Indiana State Sunday School Union. In his younger days, before commencing to publish books, he wrote quite frequently for large religious papers, the Journal and Messenger, the Southzcestem Baptist, the Tennessee Baptist, the Witness, the Christian Times, now the Standard, and for some secular papers. Concluding Statements. The three departments of his life work have been teaching, writing, and preaching, the latter including much Sunday-school work. In these lines of work and including his childhood travels, he has made fourteen journeys from Massachusetts or Indiana to Georgia and Alabama, passing from north to south and from south to north twenty-eight times, taking sometimes the Atlantic Ocean and coast route, being once east of the Gulf stream and among a school of whales, sometimes passing through Kentucky and Tennessee, and sometimes going up and down the Mississippi river; travelling in the old stage coaches, on sailing vessels, on a canal boat, on lake and river steamers, as well as on railway cars, on horseback and on foot. He has been in Montreal and on the Gulf of Mexico and in nearly every state east of the Mississippi. His first teaching was in the winter of 1843, sixty years ago, in a public school of Lake county, on the east side of Cedar Lake, and there is quite certainly no man now living who was a teacher in Lake county s*o long ago. He had charge for some years of the Crown Point Institute, taught the first normal school in the county, and gathered up from various sources for its first publication the county history. In active Sunday-school work there is room to say only this, that besides work as a missionary of the American Sunday School Union for several years, he was for twenty-two -years secretary of the County S. S. Convention. As a missionary pastor, the only minister of the gospel for several years of his denomination in the county, commencing his labors fully as such January 1, 1856, he has preached in all the central and southern parts of the county, in churches and school-houses, and has conducted burial services at twenty-two cemeteries in the county, also at Salem and in the Hebron cemetery in Porter county. This record extends from 1853 to 1904, over a period of fifty years. Hon. Bartlett Woods is reported to have remarked that Mr. Ball had carried the gospel to more people in Lake county than any other minister ever did or ever would. His disappointments, trials, sorrows, which, if few, have not been small, are not to be given in this outline. His blessings and successes of various kinds have been neither few nor small. Among these he counts the homes of his childhood and youth: well educated, cultivated, and judicious Christian parents: three manly and kind brothers and three affectionate, cultivated sisters; and more than that oft-quoted number of dear "five hundred" friends, for he has certainly been as a visitor, a tourist, a Sunday-school missionary, a gospel minister, in more than a thousand homes in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts: in Indiana and Illinois: in Kentucky and Tennessee: in (Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and he has seldom failed in every home to gain a friend. Among other great blessings he counts the Alabama maiden who became his wife, his son and daughter and other kindred dear. Successful in several particulars for which he is very grateful, he hopes yet to accomplish something more in life. He has earned something in teaching and by means of his publications. Something of an amount of money has passed through his hands, seldom more than two thousand dollars in a year, dribblets compared with what many receive and spend, and he has nothing laid by for helpless old age if that should ever come upon him. He yet has two of the great blessings of life, good eyesight and good health. Additional Comments: Extracted from: ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Genealogy and Biography OF LAKE COUNTY, INDIANA, WITH A COMPENDIUM OF HISTORY 1834—1904 A Record of the Achievements of Its People in the Making of a Commonwealth and the Founding of a Nation. REV. T. H. BALL OF CROWN POINT, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ILLUSTRATED CHICAGO NEW YORK THE LEWIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 1904 File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/in/lake/bios/ball673gbs.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/infiles/ File size: 17.4 Kb