WILLIAM TRUSTEN BALL. For the past sixteen years the stock interests of Montague county have been earnestly and modestly represented by the gentleman whose name initiates this article, and while he has maintained his residence in Bowie in the main since his advent to the “cow country” of the northwest, he has acquired grazing interests in the “plains country” and here and there have his successful efforts been directed. Mr. Ball has been a resident of Texas since November, 1873, when with his parents he settled in Grayson county, seven miles southeast of Whitesboro. The family were emigrants from Polk county, Missouri, where our subject was born July 31, 1857. At about the age of majority his father, William C. Ball, went to Polk county from Lee county, Virginia, where his birth occurred in 1822. The latter’s father was Jesse Ball, who came west and passed his last years and died in Benton county, Missouri. Jesse Ball had several children, but John, Samuel and William C., sons, are the only ones apparently accessible for this record.
William C. Ball, like his father, passed his life on the farm, brought up his family to lives of industry and sobriety and cast his lot with the south when the slavery question brought on the war. He entered into the struggle with intense feeling, fought the war to a finish and carried his enmity toward the north, whom he regarded as his persecutors, with him to his grave. He left Polk county in the time of the war and lived in Johnson, Missouri, for a time, and then came to Texas to be among his own people of the south, dying in Grayson county in 1889. He married Nancy C. Noland, a daughter of John Noland and Mary Cross, who were farmers and natives of Kentucky. Mrs. Ball died in 1891, being the mother of: George E., of Gainesville; William T., our subject; Robert, who was drowned in the Big Wichita river in the year 1881, unmarried, and James P., of Collinville, Texas.
The country schools furnished William T. Ball with the elements of an English education and he knew only the farm while under the parental roof. At eighteen years of age he went into the saddle for his brother on a ranch in Grayson county and did the first range work for the Burrell Yarbrough outfit in that county. He remained with his employer three years and was employed later in Cooke county, then a thinly settled community, and was there about three years. He had acquired a few cattle himself by this time and a small ranch, and these he sold to his brother and returned to Grayson county, where he was a cattle dealer and feeder til 1889, when he located in Montague. Mr. Ball became interested in Knox county ranching in 1901, where as a member of the firm of Boedeker & Ball, he owns and has under lease twenty-two sections, fenced and stocked, and from which the owners have been and are known as shippers. In Montague county Ball & Young, comprising W. T. Ball and Samuel Young, of Bowie, carry on a large business for this locality as feeders and shippers.
January 9, 1879, in Grayson county, William T. Ball and Luella Gregory were united in marriage. Mrs. Ball was born in Carroll county, Missouri, November 27, 1858, and is a daughter of David and Martha A. Gregory, who died on the farm near Whitesboro, leaving children; Finness, of Grayson county; Samuel, of Brisco county; Russell, who was killed in Brisco county, Texas, leaving a child; Susan, wife of James Goodson, of Carrollton, Missouri; and Belle, wife of Calvin Tomlin, of Carroll county, Missouri. Mr. and Mrs. Ball’s children are: Etta Lee, wife of Charles Brown, of Bowie, with a son, James Trusten; Sallie Belle, William David, Edith Ann and Georgia Ella complete the family. Mr. Ball, while a Democrat, has not dabbled in politics. He is a Chapter Mason and holds a membership in the Knox County Baptist church at Truscott, Texas.
Source: B. B. Paddock, History and Biographical Record of North and West Texas, Vol. II (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1906), pp. 333-334.