WILLIAM CHARLES BALL. From early manhood the career of William Charles Ball, manufacturer and philanthropist, was part of the career of the Ball Brothers of Muncie, so to relate his business and philanthropic activities merely would be to repeat the story of his family, given in various forms in this history of Indiana. A contemporary biographer has said of him "Publicity held for him no charms." His fine platform work, which on occasions held a "message" for his audiences is well known, for he was an eloquent speaker, but he was quite willing for the other fellow to enjoy the limelight. With those who knew him intimately his natural reserve vanished, and he entered into the topics of general interest, evidencing a most cultured mind and sound judgment.

He attended the public schools and completed his scholastic education in the Academy at Canandaigua, New York, to which his parents removed when he was fifteen years old. In 1877 he and his three brothers, Frank C., Edmund B. and George A., formed a business partnership under the name of "Ball Brothers" and established a small factory in Buffalo, New York, for the manufacture of tin oil cans. In 1884 glass oil cans and glass fruit jars were added to their products, and when natural gas was discovered in Indiana, in 1887, the brothers came to Muncie and put up a small factory, which grew into a fruit jar concern that eventually dominated the world's fruit jar market. When Mr. Ball died, in 1921, the little factory that he and his brothers had in stalled in Muncie, he being secretary of the company, occupied with its buildings seventy acres, gave employment to 1,500 persons and with its branch at Wichita Falls, Texas, had a daily output, in season, of over half a million glass fruit jars. Since this time other branch plants have been established, at Huntington, West Virginia; Hillsboro, Illinois; Sapulpa and Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and Noblesville, Indiana, increasing the total daily output to a million fruit jars a day.

As was true of his brothers, Mr. Ball had many and varied interests in business and philanthropics outside of the fruit jar business. To detail them would require an article of its own. The gifts the Ball Brothers have made to educational, charitable, character forming and civic purposes total many millions of dollars. William C. Ball while he lived always was a part of these donations, and his estate since his death has participated in them.

Mr. Ball was born near Greensburg, Trumbull County, Ohio, August 13, 1852, and he died in Muncie, April 21, 1921. He was married, December 22, 1890, to Emma, daughter of John D. Wood, of New York City, who survives him. She has been very active in the work of the Universalist Church, in the Federation of Woman's Clubs and is a past regent and for over twenty years has been chaplain of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The only child born to Mr. and Mrs. William C. Ball is William Hudson Ball, who is secretary of the Ball Brothers Company, representing the second generation in the business his father helped to establish. A more complete sketch of him appears elsewhere in this publication.

Politically William C. Ball was a Republican, was a member of the Universalist Church and superintendent of the Sunday School of St. John's Church.

He utilized his business merely as a medium by which to confer the greatest good, but his modesty kept much of his generosity unknown. He had an active faith in the universal brotherhood of man, and every worthy cause had an irresistible appeal to him. More than that, he had gifts of intellect and aesthetic tastes which made him a lover of the arts and sciences and endowed him with a wide culture derived from the classic authors of prose and poetry, with which his mind was richly stored.
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INDIANA ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT Vol. 3
By Charles Roll, A.M.
The Lewis Publishing Company, 1931


EDMUND BURKE BALL was one of that group of famous Indiana manufacturers known as the Ball Brothers, and was vice president of the Ball Brothers Company of Muncie and general manager of its extensive business until his death March 8, 1925.

Mr. Ball had been a resident of Muncie for over forty-five years, and he fully shared in the generous enterprise and philanthropic activities for which he and his brothers are so well known. He was chairman of the City Park Board, for several years chairman of the City Planning Commission, and individually and through his business organization contributed to the institutions that are distinctive features of Muncie as a cultural community, including the Ball State Teachers College, the Ball Memorial Hospital, the Muncie Y. M. C. A.

Edmund Burke Ball was born at Greensburg in Trumbull County, Ohio, October 21, 1855, a son of Lucius Stiles and Maria P. (Bingham) Ball. At an early age he became associated with his brothers as glass manufacturers, and was one of the first Ball brothers to come to Muncie, during the 1880s. On October 7, 1903, he married Miss Bertha Crosley, daughter of Rev. Marion Crosley, of Indianapolis. Four children were born to their marriage: Edmund F.; Clinton Crosley, who died in 1912; Adelia, and Janice.

Edmund F. Ball, now of the second generation in the Ball Brothers organization, graduated from Yale University in 1927 and is now assistant secretary of the Ball Brothers Company. He is very popular in the younger social set and in connection with various civic organizations.

Mrs. Ball and her children recently presented a statue to the City of Muncie, which stands at the approach to the bridge on the boulevard near the city. This statue is known as "The Appeal to the Great Spirit" and is a memorial to Mr. Edmund Burke Ball.

The late Edmund B. Ball was a member of the Universalist Church. He had been honored with the supreme thirty-third degree in Scottish Rite Masonry. He was president of the Muncie & Portland Traction Company, and a director in the Indiana Union Traction Company, the Indianapolis, Newcastle & Eastern Traction Company, the Warner Gear Company, the Durham Manufacturing Company, Merchants National Bank, Merchants Trust Company. He was a trustee of the Indiana Boys School at Plainfield, of Hillsdale College in Michigan, of the Muncie City Hospital, and one of the largest individual contributors to the Ball Memorial Hospital. Mr. and Mrs. Ball gave a tract of land and building on the banks of the Tippecanoe Lake as the site of a Y. M. C. A. boys' camp, which is now known as Camp Crosley, a memorial to their deceased son, Crosley Ball. Camp Crosley is attended every year by hundreds of boys, who participate in and secure recreation and physical, mental and moral fitness from its program of athletics and outdoor sports, its camp fires, instruction periods and religious exercises.
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INDIANA ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT Vol. 3
By Charles Roll, A.M.
The Lewis Publishing Company, 1931


FRANK CLAYTON BALL, of Muncie, is one of the five Ball brothers whose fame as industrial leaders gives them high rank among American manufacturers. They have not only brought new forms of industrial wealth to Indiana, but have been benefactors of the state in many ways. It was through the Ball brothers that Indiana was presented with the opportunity to commemorate properly one of the state's most interesting shrines, the early home of Abraham Lincoln in Spencer County. In 1929 Frank Clayton Ball and his brothers bought the tract of land at Lincoln City on which stood the Thomas Lincoln cabin, in the construction of which Abraham Lincoln contributed and which was the home of Abraham during his most impressionable years, until the family moved to Illinois. It was here that Nancy Hanks died. On this land when the Ball brothers bought it were located a village school house, a church building, a small hotel and several cottages. All of these buildings were removed and some grading was done in preparation for proper landscaping. In 1929, at the State House in Indianapolis, Mr. F. C.Ball, representing his brothers, gave a deed to Governor Leslie and the State of Indiana to this land, and it is now possible to carry out the long cherished project of erecting a suitable monument to Abraham Lincoln and his mother, Nancy Hanks, on the site of the old Lincoln cabin.

Frank Clayton Ball, who is president of the Ball Brothers Company, was born at the Village of Greensburg in Trumbull County, Ohio, November 24, 1857. He is a descendant of Edward Ball, who came from England about 1640, first locating at Brantford, Connecticut, and later moving to New Jersey. He married Abigail Blatchley. Edward Ball was sheriff of Essex County, New Jersey. His son, Thomas Ball, married Sarah Davis, and their son, Moses Ball, who established what has since been known as the Ball family homestead at Springfield, New Jersey, married Lucretia Dalgleisch. The next generation was represented by Jonathan Ball, who was a soldier in the Revolutionary war and afterwards moved to Bridgeport, Addison County, Vermont, and from there went across the line to Canada, locating at Ascot and Sherbroke. Jonathan Ball married Sarah Stiles. Their son, William Ball, grandfather of Frank Clayton Ball, married Marcy Harvey. William Ball and wife lived on their farm at Ascot, Canada, where their son Lucius Stiles Ball and his three brothers and three sisters were born. Later, about 1838, the family moved to Trumbull County, Ohio, where William Ball bought a tract of land, from which he and his son cleared the timber and erected one of the typical log houses that sheltered most of the pioneer families in that vicinity. Lucius Stiles Ball married Maria P. Bingham, and they were the parents of eight children, the six sons being Lucius L., William C., Edmund B., Frank Clayton, George A. and Clinton E., the latter of whom died when two years old; and the two daughters of the family were Lucina A. and Frances May. Lucina A. Ball, who was the oldest of the children, had a remarkable career as an educator. She was associated with George W. Childs, the famous editor and owner of the Philadelphia Ledger, and was a life long friend of the famous Drexell family of Philadelphia, and after the founding of the Drexell Institute served as its financial secretary for a number of years. She died January 14, 1901. Frances May Ball became the wife of Dr. J. W. Mauck, for many years president of Hillsdale College at Hillsdale, Michigan.

Of his parents Mr. Frank C. Ball has written the following interesting comments: "Our father was a man of good sound judgment, high moral character, modest, refined, of a sensitive nature, a man of few words and fond of his family. He was the oldest boy and his brothers and sisters looked to him for advice and leadership. His father made his home with us up to the time of his death. Our mother was a remarkably strong woman, physically and mentally, with a sweet Christian spirit. Her home and her children were all her. Her chief ambition was to bring children with good strong minds and bodies, with right ideals and truest Christian principles. She urged us always to stick together and help each other, and it was through her influence and advice that we five brothers been associated in business throughout life. She was a devoted wife, an affectionate mother, interested in all good movements admired by her many friends. She attended public school at Stansted, Canada, where her parents lived on a farm, until eighteen years of age, when she began teaching. While teaching at Greensburg, Ohio, she met and was married to my father, Lucius Stiles Ball, on September 1, 1846.

In 1862. when Frank Clayton Ball was five years of age, the family moved to a farm on Grand Island, a large island in Niagara River, extending from a few miles below the mouth of Lake Erie to within five miles of Niagara Falls. In reaching this island the family in the absence of railroads moved their household goods in wagons, driving to Ashtabula and then along the shore of Lake Erie to Buffalo, thence to Tonawanda, and from that point ferried over the river to the island. Their farm was at the foot of the island, where the two forks of the river came together, four miles above the rapids. It was a wonderfully attractive place in summer, but very desolate in winter. Here Frank C. Ball and his brothers learned to swim, handle boats in the swift currents, and these opportunities continued when after two years the family left the island and moved to the mainland at Tonawanda, on the banks of the Niagara River, where the Ball family had their home two years more. They then moved to Canandaigua, where Lucius Stiles Ball conducted a store. The children attended public school there and the Canandaigua Academy. One of the older brothers, Edmund, now deceased, during one summer worked as a farm hand and in the winter of 1878 accompanied his cousin, Charles Baker, to the pineries of Michigan, where he worked at cutting logs. While he was there word came of the death of his father and he started at once by slow over the deep snow to the nearest railway station twenty miles away, reaching home just in time for the funeral. He and his brother Frank C. then located at Buffalo and started the manufacture of fish kits, small tubs for packing salt fish. This business came to an end when their plant burned and swept away all their invested resources. Edmund and Frank Ball next undertook the manufacture of kerosene oil cans, and soon afterward began making glass containers enclosed in metal cans. This was the beginning of the Ball brothers interests in glass manufacturing. About 1883 the three other brothers, Lucius, William and George, joined them.

In a very notable degree the presence of fuel has been the decisive factor in the location of manufacturing industries, and glass plants have responded in special measure to the presence of natural gas. Thus when natural gas was discovered in Indiana, in 1887, the Ball brothers soon afterward sought a location in this state and established a factory at Muncie, which was then in the midst of a great natural gas field. They kept their sheet metal works at Buffalo until 1900, when that plant also was brought to Muncie. For a number of years the business was known as the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company, and later was organized and incorporated as the Ball Brothers Company, of which Frank Clayton Ball was elected president, with E. B. Ball, vice president and general manager, W. C. Ball, secretary, G. A. Ball, treasurer, and L. L. Ball, a director. L. L. Ball was one member of the family who chose a professional career, becoming a physician. Since starting to make glass insets for their metal containers for oil the Ball brothers have been primarily glass manufacturers. Soon they shifted the emphasis of their business to the making of canning or packing jars of the familiar "Mason" type, and there is probably not a household in America which is not familiar with the glass containers for fruit and vegetables with the name Ball blown on the glass. In 1888, shortly after they moved the plant to Muncie, their yearly production of fruit jars aggregated about 25,000 gross. Since then this total has been raised to over a million gross, and the annual volume of business increased from $200,000 to approximately $10,000,000. They have long ranked supreme as the largest manufacturers of fruit jars in the world. They not only make the glass containers but the metal tops and have through their inventive genius contributed many new processes and new machinery to the glass making industry. They also acquired subsidiary industries, building a paper mill at Muncie, a corrugating plant, a zinc rolling mill, and another paper mill at Noblesville, Indiana, and due to the presence or natural gas and fuel oil a number of years ago established a large glass factory at Wichita Falls, Texas.

Ball Brothers are said to have contributed millions of dollars to public institutions not only in Indiana but elsewhere. One of the chief objects of their benefactions was the Indiana Normal School at Muncie, which the five brothers presented to the state in 1918, and has since been known as the Ball Teachers College. They were large contributors to the Y. M. C. A., Y. W. C. A., gave the building and grounds for the Muncie City Hospital, now known as the Ball Memorial Hospital, were contributors to the Masonic Temple, the Auditorium, the Riley Hospital, to Hillsdale College and Keuka College. Frank C. Ball has for a number of years been president of the Muncie Y. M. C. A., and it was in recognition of his many outstanding services to the state that Indiana University on June 12, 1929, conferred upon him the honorary degree Doctor of Laws.

Doctor Ball has been president of the Muncie & Portland Traction Company, president of the Muncie & Western Railroad Company, is a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, of the Indiana State Normal (including Ball State and Indiana State Normal at Terre Haute), of Keuka College in New York, of the Methodist Hospital at Indianapolis, the Borg Warner Company of Chicago. He is a Knight Templar and Scottish Rite Mason, member of the First Presbyterian Church and the Rotary Club.

He married at Muncie in 1893 Miss Elizabeth Wolfe Brady. They have three daughters, Lucy, Margaret and Rosemary, and two sons, E. Arthur and Frank Elliott Ball. Edmund Arthur Ball is a World war veteran, is a past commander of the Indiana Division of the American Legion, and is now treasurer of the Ball Brothers Company.

Mrs. Ball is a member of one of Muncie's oldest and most noted families. She was born in that city, daughter of Thomas J. and Emiline (Wolfe) Brady, her mother being a daughter of Adam and Elizabeth (Elliott) Wolfe. Adam Wolfe died in the spring of 1872. He was born in Washington County, Pennsylvania, in 1807, son of John and Catherine (Devore) Wolfe, who in 1809 moved to Coshocton County, Ohio, and in 1855 located at Muncie, where he continued his prominent activities in merchandising and banking. Mrs. Ball's father was Thomas J. Brady, one of the best known men in Indiana. His father, John Brady, was the first mayor of Muncie. Thomas J. Brady was born in 1840 and became captain of the first company recruited at Muncie for service in the Civil war. In 1863 he was promoted to colonel, and in July, 1865, retired with the brevet rank of brigadier general. General Brady figured prominently in the newspaper business at Muncie, and served as postmaster general under President Hayes. His three children comprise Mrs. Ball, Arthur W. Brady, president of the Indiana Union Traction Company, and Mrs. John Ottis Adams, wife of one of Indiana's greatest artists.

INDIANA ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT Vol. 3
By Charles Roll, A.M.
The Lewis Publishing Company, 1931


RALPH R. TEETOR is vice president of The Perfect Circle Company at Hagerstown, the industry which has probably done more to advertise Hagerstown abroad as an important industrial center of Indiana than any other institution.

Mr. Teetor, who is a mechanical engineer by profession, was born at Hagerstown, August 17, 1890, son of John H. and Kate C. (Rowe) Teetor. His father was born in Wayne County, Indiana, and his mother in Frederick, Maryland. Ralph R. Teetor attended private school in Chicago in 1897-98, during his early boyhood, after that attending public schools in Hagerstown and was graduated from high school in 1908. From 1908 to 1912 he was a student in the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with the degree Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. In recognition of his outstanding achievements in the filed of mechanical engineering his Alma Mater, the University of Pennsylvania, in June, 1930, conferred upon him the honorary degree of Mechanical Engineer.

Mr. Teetor, after graduating, joined the engineering department, of the Teetor-Hartley Motor Company at Hagerstown. This company sold all its manufacturing interests in 1918 except the piston ring division, and that department has since been developed as an independent industry, and is probably the largest single factory producing piston rings for motor engines in the world.

In August, 1918, Mr. Ralph Teetor resigned the company and spent one year as assistant to the superintendent of the New York Ship Building Corporation at Camden, New Jersy. This was his active war service, and , on returning to Hagerstown he again became associated with the engineering department in the rank of chief engineer for the Indiana Piston Ring Company. Since 1926 the business has been known as The Perfect Circle Company, and Mr. Teetor on July 1, 1928, was made first vice president of the company, in charge of engineering.

He married, December 30, 1922, Miss Nellie Van Antwerp, who was born at Huntington, Indiana, daughter of Theodore and May (Ireland) Van Antwerp. Her father was a native of Asbury Park, New Jersey, while her mother was born at Huntington, Indiana.

For seven years Mr. Teetor was president of the Hagerstown school board. He was chairman in 1926-27 of the Indiana section of the National Society of Automotive Engineers. He was also elected, in January, 1930, for two years, to the council of the same National Society. He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is a member of the University Club of Chicago, the Indianapolis Athletic Club and the Columbia Club of Indianapolis. He is a director of the Union Trust Company of Hagerstown, having held that position since 1921. He is a Republican and a member of the Christian Science Church of Hagerstown, and is also a thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason, and member of Murat Temple A. A. O. N. M. S., Indianapolis.

Outside of his business Mr. Teetor's most important interest and connection has been in the Boy Scout movement. He is vice president of the Wayne County Council of Boy Scouts, and his interest and financial aid have made possible the building of an ideal Boy Scout camp at Hagerstown. The camp is located on twenty-five acres of ground near the old Doerstler Sawmill, which was at one time the work-shop and mill of Rev. Lewis Teetor. The construction of a dam has made possible a beautiful lake, affording facilities for water sports, swimming and boating, to the Scouts.

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INDIANA ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT Vol. 3
By Charles Roll, A.M.
The Lewis Publishing Company, 1931


OSCAR G. FOELLINGER, president and general manager of the News Publishing Company of Fort Wayne, deserves a large share of credit for the making of the News-Sentinel, one of the outstanding examples of Indiana journalism. The community of Fort Wayne has reason to esteem him for many other activities, leadership in matters vital to the city and to the welfare of its inhabitants.

Mr. Foellinger was born at Fort Wayne, April 11, 1885, son of Martin C. and Christina (Stellhorn) Foellinger. He was educated in the parochial schools of the Immanuel Lutheran Church and began life without any particular advantages, social or financial, except a resolute purpose, an unwavering ambition and ability to work, and with experience to direct the work of others.

He was working even while in school, and in 1901, at the age of sixteen, he became an employee of the Citizens Trust Company of Fort Wayne, with which he remained about five years, reaching the post of assistant cashier. His time has been fully taken up with newspaper work since 1905. He was business manager for the Journal Gazette Company until1910, and in the latter year joined the News Publishing Company, was made general manager in 1912, and since 1919 has been both president and general manager. He is also a director of the Lincoln National Bank & Trust Company.

Outside of his own business the activities that have perhaps made him best known in the community has been his leadership in the fight against tuberculosis. He has for some years been a director of both the Fort Wayne and Indiana State Anti-Tuberculosis League. He has been a member of the executive committee of the Fort Wayne League, has acted as camp general of the Camp Christmas Seal Health Camp for under-par children and has devoted not only time but his personal means to the success of this charitable progress. He has attended many state conferences of the Indiana Anti-Tuberculosis League and has taken part in the formulation of its policies and in the direction of its interests. Mr. Foellinger individually and through his newspaper has constantly worked for improved highways. During the World war he was a local leader in the first, second and fourth Liberty Loan drives and War Savings Stamp campaigns, in the campaign for clothing for the destitute victims of the war, and in the Red Cross Auction. He was in the original Y. M. C. A. building campaign of 1916; has taken part in the annual Community Chest campaigns, and in those for the Day Nursery and the Red Cross membership drives. He has served as president of the Quest Club and chairman of its civic interest committee, and is a director of the Fort Wayne Boy Scouts Council. He is a member of the Fort Wayne Industrial Commission, the Clinton Street Association, the Rotary Club, Fort Wayne Country Club, Hamilton Club of Chicago, Columbia Club and the Trinity English Lutheran Church. Fraternally he is affiliated with Home Lodge No. 342, A. F. and A. M., the thirty-second degree Scottish Rite bodies and Mizpah Temple of the Mystic Shrine. Mr. Foellinger as a young man was a first lieutenant in the Indiana National Guard with the Fort Wayne Battery from 1903 to 1906. He is a member of the National Press Club, the American Newspaper Publishers Association. Without official aspirations he has done a great deal of substantial work for the Republican party in Indiana. He was delegate at large from the state to the Republican national convention of 1924, when Calvin Coolidge was nominated. In 1928 he was state manager for Hoover in the primary campaign and state manager for the Hoover for President Clubs.

Mr. Foellinger married, November 16, 1909, Miss Esther Anna Deuter, daughter of Michael and Hannah Deuter, of Fort Wayne. Mr. and Mrs. Foellinger have two daughters, Helene Ruth and Loretta Esther.

INDIANA ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT Vol. 3
By Charles Roll, A.M.
The Lewis Publishing Company, 1931


Deb Murray