Historic Ball Home Tour
by Angie Klink
Angie Klink is the author of ten books. She writes memoirs, biographies, histories, documentaries, children’s books, essays, and advertising copy. You can learn more about this link: https://angieklink.com/bio/
Photo Gallery: Check photo gallery at the end of the article.
Evelyn (Osterman) Ball instructed her four-year-old daughter to stand for a photo in Spring Vale Cemetery in Lafayette, Indiana, next to a new memorial stone tablet honoring Georgia Stockton Hatcher, founding regent of the General de Lafayette Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). It was Memorial Day 1937, and little Annette “Winter” Ball wore a dainty smocked, white dress, matching anklets and leather laced shoes to perform a ceremonial task honoring the woman who was her grandmother’s cousin, and, thus, her cousin who had died in 1903.
“My mother told me that a ribbon held the cover on the tablet,” Winter recalled decades later. “And my job was to pull the ribbon at the appointed time so that the cover fell off. Ta da!”
Snap! A photo captured young Winter, a member of DAR’s companion organization for youngsters, Children of the American Revolution (CAR), standing next to the stone tablet decorated with a basket of peonies nearly as tall as she.
On October 22, 2022, that little girl now age 90, welcomed the DAR chapter of which her mother had been a member to host a public tour of the historic and storied Ball home where she grew up. The Second Empire red brick mansion was built by Winter’s great, great grandparents Judge Cyrus and Rebecca (Gordon) Ball just after the Civil War in 1868-1869 atop Prospect Hill at 402 South Ninth Street in a neighborhood now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The home’s Italianate architecture is such a show stopper that passersby look up in awe at its stately turret, “widow’s walk” with an ornate wrought iron fence and arched front doors with luminous stained-glass windows and ask themselves, What is it like inside?
They may assume that the six generations of the Ball family who have lived there were and are “rich people” therefore “pretentious.” While the home is filled with treasures, rare paintings and portraits, sculptures, stunning chandeliers, and fine antique furniture, all museum-quality, the true riches inside lie in the more than 200-year legacy of the Balls’ commitment to act upon their moral principles even when they are unpopular or dangerous. The Balls, like their relative and local DAR founder Georgia Stockton Hatcher, were abolitionists.
Throughout their history, the Balls have striven for equality for all, particularly African Americans and Native Americans. Before building their home on Ninth Street, Cyrus and Rebecca Ball lived at Sixth and Main in a home that was a station on the Underground Railroad. Today, the location is a parking lot across from Long Center for the Performing Arts. Risking fines and imprisonment for aiding fugitives, the Balls housed, fed and clothed runaway enslaved African Americans in their small back kitchen. At night, Cyrus, a judge jeopardizing his profession and more, escorted the brave runaways to the next station.
Rebecca publicly debated the political and moral controversy over slavery. In poetry and newspaper serials she condemned the expansion of slavery into Kansas and the injustices of the Fugitive Slave Acts. Cyrus and Rebecca were charter members of Lafayette’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, a congregation committed to unity and, today, to ending racial injustice and promoting inclusiveness.
Winter is named after her great-grandmother Annette (Winter) Ball, a charter member of the Lafayette DAR chapter, as well as a cousin and mother figure to organizing regent Georgia Stockton Hatcher, for whom Winter unveiled the cemetery marker when she was a child. Her namesake was the daughter of celebrated Indiana artist George Winter, and the walls of the Ball home are lined with his original paintings of Potawatomi and Miami Native Americans.
In 1933 when Winter was one year old, her mother Evelyn rescued valuable George Winter artwork from the trash when her husband’s warehouse at Sixth and Main was being torn down. Evelyn pulled up to the building, looked up to a second-story window and saw a workman punching a painting out of a frame before throwing it into a truck below. She ran in, stopped the workers and discovered the Winter collection stored in a forgotten room. Until that moment, no one knew that George Winter had previously worked from a studio in the building, and thanks to Evelyn’s keen eye and moxie, his priceless paintings are preserved for generations to come as a record in oils of the history and ethos of Potawatomi and Miami tribes.
The Balls also cherished simple pursuits amid nature. For many years they spent summers along the Kankakee River on land Cyrus Ball purchased near Riverside in LaPorte County, Indiana. The Grand Kankakee Marsh was referred to as “The Everglades of the North.” Prior to 1852, it was the largest wetland area in North America and drew hunters from around the world, including Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland.
Winter’s father Cable, whom she called “Pop,” had fond childhood memories of the camp where Winter’s great grandparents lived in a houseboat they named “Rudder Grange” after Author Frank Stockton’s 1879 novel about the whimsical adventures of a family living on a canal boat.
Well-known family and friends visited the camp, including Georgia Stockton Hatcher, Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur, Bruce Rogers, famous type designer who created the Lafayette DAR chapter logo, and his friend Evaleen Stein, a nationally-known author, poet and artist who later lived around the corner from the Ball home on Hitt Street.
Stein and her family vacationed every year at the campsite christened, “Camp Evaleen,” and some of her poetry and paintings were inspired from the area’s natural habitat. Winter, a nature lover who learned to fish from her father, is an admirer of Stein, and her collection of Stein watercolors and pen and ink drawings are displayed in the “Kankakee Room” of the Ball home.
Sadly, the beautiful marsh was dredged to create farmland, and by 1917 a majority of the marshlands were drained, negatively affecting the country’s eco-system and greatly reducing the wildlife population in the U.S.
Winter married Bruce Bottum and they had six children. After her mother Evelyn died in the Ball home in 2005, her daughter Cecily Gordon (Bottum) Schneider lived there and became a member of DAR, following in her grandmother’s and cousin’s footsteps. Cecily attended a meeting of the Lafayette DAR chapter just prior to her unexpected passing in spring 2022. It had been Cecily’s idea that her beloved DAR host a public tour of the Ball residence with proceeds benefiting the organization’s restoration efforts and plans for a historical marker. Six months after Cecily’s death, Winter fulfilled her late daughter’s vision and opened up her home for the Historic Ball House Tour held in Cecily’s honor.
The event would not have been possible without the lifetime efforts of Winter’s mother Evelyn known as “The Queen Mum of Ninth Street Hill” by her friends and neighbors who were welcomed into her home for parties and meetings. While active in St. John’s Episcopal Church and in a long list of art, historical and literary organizations, Evelyn diligently tended to the upkeep of the home where she and her husband Cable raised Winter and her brother Remington Squier Ball.
Winter inherited her father’s kindness and her mother’s altruism. She has many fond memories of growing up in the Ball home, spending time tending the ponds and climbing the trees surrounding the house. She was fascinated with the stories of her great-grandfather Cyrus Gordon “Gordy” Ball’s pet alligator. He came home with the alligator and a one-legged crane after a fishing trip to Florida.
“The alligator lived in the basement in the winter and had a pool in the side yard in the summer,” Winter recalled. “But when the animal took a notion to roam, people down the hill would call up on the phone, and the gardener would capture the critter and bring him home in a wheelbarrow. Guess he was a brave soul. I was told the one-legged crane stayed around the house okay and was happy enough just to follow Grody to the barn and back.”
Winter’s mother decorated her bedroom as it remains today with an early 1800s canopied rope bed, a family heirloom, adorned with an indigo blue and white coverlet commemorating General de Lafayette, the French officer who aided George Washington’s Continental Army during the American Revolution and the namesake of the city of Lafayette and the local DAR Chapter.
An environmentalist, Winter worked for the Indiana Dept. of Environmental Management in Air Pollution and Control, retiring at age 80. She wanted those who attended the Historical Ball House Tour to leave inspired. On the day of the event, she shared her poignant thoughts:
“My October hope is that our house ghosts are wafting forth a gentle reminder that posh surrounds can encourage a slothful or arrogant way of thinking or can birth one of grace. So let it be the example of Cyrus and Rebecca living rather dangerously because of their active support of abolitionist values.
Or maybe some guest will take away an insight by learning about the curiosity of the English foreigner, George Winter, who was spurred to get to know personally and then document the lives and images of Indiana’s Potawatomi and Miami.
Or perhaps our guest will be inspired by the simple fishing camp on the river where nobody took more from nature than what was needed.
If a guest should take away any of the house ghosts’ gentle reminders, I will be happy, feel I have lived up to the standards of the DAR Lafayette Chapter, and will find the whole experience worth it.”
The little girl who once stood next to the DAR tablet memorializing her cousin, the founding regent of the General de Lafayette DAR Chapter, came full circle 85 years later as she unveiled her family’s home, a testament to the Balls’ dedication to humanity, art and nature. Six generations of the Ball family have exemplified the motto of the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution—God, Home and Country.
General de Lafayette Chapter NSDAR 