Outagamie County WI Archives Biographies.....Ballard, Anson 1821 - 1873
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Joy Fisher http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00001.html#0000031 August 9, 2008, 11:30 pm

Author: J. F. Fuller

Anson Ballard.

FEW among those who have gone from the membership of the Congregational church
of Appleton have left a more lasting impress either on it, or on the city in
which it is located, than Anson Ballard.

     Mr. Ballard was born in Watertown, N. Y., Dec. 20th, 1821. He graduated
with high honor at Hamilton college, N. V., in 1844, and was educated as a
lawyer. He came to the West in 1849, and to Appleton, where he spent the
remainder of his life, in 1850. He was married in 1851 to Harriet Story, at
Sheboygan. He died in Appleton, April 4th, 1873.

    Mr. Ballard began life in Appleton as a lawyer, but was gradually drawn more
and more from the practice of law to the development of the landed interests of
this, then new, country. He was a man of wide and exact information and of
positive convictions, but one who habitually said but little, and whose
conversation was of the sober kind; underneath this soberness, however, there
was a vein of humor, often appearing at unexpected times, which was "as
refreshing as a summer shower."

     But Mr. Ballard, though eminently a successful business man and one of
little leisure, was always accessible, whether the call be one of business or
friendship. He was a man who appreciated his adopted city, and was from the
first deeply interested in, and closely identified with, nearly every enterprise
which tended to its development. With nothing, however, was he perhaps more
closely identified than with its educational life. As a young man he had been a
teacher, and his interest in the right training of children grew with his years
so as to become at last almost a ruling passion. He was a warm friend of the
public schools, but the plan which weighed most heavily on his later years was
the establishment of a school under the Peztalotzian system, of the superior
advantages of which he had become thoroughly convinced. His ideals in this were
very high, and he gave to their development freely of time and thought and
money. The school was never self-sustaining and was closed soon after Mr.
Ballard's death, but had he lived to carry out his plans it might have been seen
that in them he was far in advance of his age.

     Mr. Ballard came into the church in 1857 on confession of his faith, and
was ever afterwards one of its strongest and most consistent, but at the same
time one of its most unostentatious, supporters. His Christianity was practical,
and he brought into the church and society many of the methods of his business
life. God had endowed him with large means and a liberal heart, and these were
henceforth consecrated to His service. He was a generous and a cheerful giver to
the missions and other benevolences of the church and to the necessities of the
poor about him. For the support of the home church and society his gifts were
very large. As an illustration, it often happened in those days that the
financial year of the church would end with a deficiency, in which case Mr.
Ballard would usually pledge one-half the amount, conditioned that the other
half be raised at once, that a new year might not begin with the incubus of a
debt upon it.

    Mr. Ballard supported the church also by his presence, being rarely absent
from it on the Sabbath or from the mid-week prayer meeting His pastor and his
fellow church members knew where to find him, and that they could lean heavily
and confidently upon him. In his death the church and the community lost one who
was "in every sense of the word a great and a good man."
                                                    J. T. REEVE.


Additional Comments:

Extracted from:

THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH.
APPLET0N, WIS.

PREPARED FOR THE
SEMI-CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY, DEC. 18, 1900.
BY
J. F. FULLER, A. M., Compiler of the "Fuller" Genealogy.

1850—1900.
APPLETON PRINTING CO.,
APPLETON, WIS.


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