Seth Slabaugh The Star Press
Published 8:32 AM EST Feb 29, 2020
MUNCIE, Ind. — The yellow-brick Lucius L. and Sarah Rogers Ball home doesn't draw as much attention or foot traffic as the other Ball family homes on Minnetrista Boulevard.
It's smaller. It's the only one that wasn't built by one of the five Ball brothers of Ball canning jar fame. Lucius and Sarah never even named the house. Much of the first floor is used as public restrooms serving the west end of the 40-acre Minnetrista campus of historic homes, gardens and a modern museum. The second floor is used as staff office space.
However, the building's stature is expected to grow when "Bob Ross comes home," as Karen M. Vincent puts it, in October.
The late, soft-spoken television artist — who has become an internet celebrity since dying in 1995 — filmed "The Joy of Painting" in the L.L. Ball Home, as it is sometimes known, when it was occupied by local PBS station WIPB in the 1980s. His former studio in the home is being refurbished for the "Bob Ross Experience," to include the re-created studio, gallery space and painting workshop.
"With Bob Ross being such a cultural phenomenon, it's quite possible that the L.L. house will become the busiest of all the houses," Vincent, director of special projects at Minnetrista, told The Star Press.
There used to be five Ball brothers' homes on the boulevard; now there are just four, Vincent noted during a recent talk about the history of the L.L. home at Westminster Village retirement community:
• Frank C. and Elizabeth "Bessie" Brady Ball's 19-room mansion, known as "Minnetrista," aka "gathering place by the water," was built around 1893. Fire destroyed it in February of 1967. It is now the site of Minnetrista's museum.
• The Gothic-Revival style Edmund B. and Bertha Crosley Ball home, built around 1907, is known as "Nebosham." Owned by the Ball State University Foundation, it offers low- and no-cost intellectual programs, classes, seminars and workshops to the public.
• The red-brick Georgian style William C. and Emma Wood Ball home, built around 1897, is known as "Maplewood." Owned by the Ball Brothers Foundation, it is used as housing for medical students.
• The shingle-style George A. and Frances Woodworth Ball home, known as "Oakhurst," was built around 1895. Owned by Minnetrista, it is full of interactive experiences for visitors.
• The L.L. Ball Home was built most likely in the 1870s. Documentation of who exactly built it and when is lacking, Vincent said. But it was sold to Frank and George Ball in 1894, and six years later, they sold it to Sarah Ball. She and Lucius, a physician and the oldest of the five brothers, were already living in the house by the time it was sold to Sarah. In 1910, Lucius and Sarah extensively remodeled and enlarged the wood-frame former farm house, faced it with yellow brick, and raised the roof line.
It's not clear why the house was sold to Sarah. Vincent speculated it was perhaps kept out of her husband's name in the event someone sued him for medical malpractice.
(One other house still on the boulevard, the Mary Lincoln Cottage, was built by the Ball family for Isaac Lincoln, Jr., and Lois Lucina Bingham Lincoln, the younger sister of Maria Bingham Ball, mother of the Ball brothers. Mary Lincoln was hired by her cousins to the first cashier at their glass factory. After her death in 1950, the cottage became a rental but has since served as headquarters for various local non-profits, like Muncie-Delaware Clean and Beautiful).
According to a letter written to one of the brothers by their older sister, Lucina — who Vincent believes was "a little bit of a bossy older sister and perhaps a know-it-all" — she had instructed the brothers "to buy a syndicate of land, buy all of your land together, and then build your homes side by side," Vincent said.
Because their mother also had advised the brothers to stick together, "I always say these were very smart men because they listened to the women in their family," Vincent said of the industrialists/philanthropists.
The 1818 Treaty of St. Mary's gave Rebecca Hackley — the half-Miami granddaughter of the famous Miami war chief Little Turtle — a reservation known as the Hackley Reserve, the picturesque, horseshoe-shaped bend in White River and land that now includes the Ball mansions/Minnetrista, the county fairgrounds, Central High School and the Delaware County Building.
In 1827, Hackley sold the reserve for $960 to an "energetic, shrewd trader born in New York of New England ancestry" named Goldsmith Gilbert, generally regarded as the founder of Muncie.
But Goldsmith, who already was squatting on the land, didn't pay her the full price, and Hackley spent the rest of her life trying to get that money, Elizabeth Glenn, a retired Ball State anthropologist, told The Star Press in 2001.
After hiring an attorney, Hackley finally received the full payment in March of 1835, when she was literally on her death bed. She died three months later.
"Gilbert tried very hard to renege on his obligation," Vincent said.
Both Gilbert and Hackley have streets named for them in Muncie. Reserve Street is also named for the Hackley Reserve.
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Gilbert passed the property to his daughter, Mary Jane, reputedly the first white child born in Muncie. She then sold the property to Muncie business partners Jacob Wysor and John Jack in March of 1853, according to Vincent.
While it's not known who built the first house on the property, probably in the 1870s, Muncie attorney/judge George Koons and his family lived in it during the 1880s and 1890s before the Balls acquired it.
Lucius, Sarah and their daughter Helen all lived in the house, Vincent said. Helen married and moved out in 1924. After Lucius died in 1932, Sarah continued to live there until her death in 1952, when the house was left to Helen and her husband, Leland.
Helen, who graduated from Vassar College, and Leland, who taught economics at Columbia, New York and Princeton universities, lived briefly in Rome before spending the rest of their lives 15 miles north of Manhattan in Bronxville, N.Y., which ranked ninth in Bloomberg's "America's 100 Richest Places" last year. Helen was a founding member of the League of Women Voters in Bronxville and active in other organizations.
Helen and Leland donated the house to the Ball Brothers Foundation after her mother's death, and the building became a rental, with the foundation as landlord, for the next two decades.
"A groundswell of activism and support for a public television station in East Central Indiana culminated in WIPB going on the air in Muncie on Oct. 31, 1971," Vincent said. For its first several years, the station was housed at Ball State, but when space became tight BSU leased the L.L. Ball Home from the Ball Brothers Foundation and started broadcasting from there in June of 1974. Bob Ross taped "The Joy of Painting" in the house in the mid-1980s.
In 1988, the university's Ball Communication Building, named for Edmund F. Ball, opened with spacious studios for WIPB. After WIPB moved out of the L.L. Ball Home, it housed BSU's advancement and development offices.
In 1994, the L.L. property was deeded to Minnetrista, and it became a welcome center for the newly rehabilitated Oakhurst house and gardens next door. When Oakhurst opened in 1995, all visits and an orientation slide show started in the former dining room of the L.L. Ball Home. Now, the only use of the first floor is public restrooms.
In previous years, there was a library on the second floor, but then the library was converted to offices, and a gift shop was added and then removed from the former parlor.
A myth associated with the property is that the home faced Wheeling Avenue when Lucius and Sarah first moved in, and that they had the house lifted up and turned 180 degrees when they enlarged it, so that it would face Minnetrista Boulevard like the other Ball homes.
Wikipedia helps perpetuate that legend: "Instead of constructing a new residence in Muncie as his brothers did, Lucius purchased an existing home and had it turned to face Minnetrista Boulevard." As its source, the online encyclopedia cites "Ray Boomhower (Winter 1995). 'Destination Indiana: Oakhurst, East-Central Indiana's Natural Beauty'. Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society. 7 (1): 45."
Boomhower wrote the Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History magazine article before research was conducted about the tale.
In 2013, Minnetrista archivist Susan Smith and historic-preservation graduate student Brad Carter studied photographs of the house, poured over blueprints of the remodeling, and spent hours going through the house from attic to basement, studying staircases, floorboards, ceiling joists, footers and more, Vincent said.
"What they found was conclusive evidence that the house had not been turned but that it had always faced the river," she went on.
Addressing the fallacy, Vincent pointed out that the entrance to Dr. Lucius Ball's home office was located at the rear of the house. Patients would travel down Wheeling Pike, as it was known then, by foot, bicycle or street car and enter the back door of the house to enter the doctor's office, "so yes, in a way the house did face Wheeling, just not the front of the house."
Vincent described Lucius as "kindly and lovable" and his wife Sarah, a nurse, as "jolly with a keen sense of humor." In addition to maintaining a private practice, Lucius served as corporate physician for several insurance companies and for Ball Brothers Co., on whose board of directors he sat. He also delivered his baby nieces and nephews, treated their cuts and scrapes as they grew up, and took them fishing. Sarah was a favorite aunt who played cards with the nieces and nephews.
While it is not as large as the other Ball houses, the L.L. Ball Home contains Vincent's favorite room in all of the houses: the second-story sewing room in the front of the house with a great view of the big bend in the river.
Contact Seth Slabaugh at (765) 213-5834 or seths@muncie.gannett.com
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