Henry Waring Ball Letters (Z/1842)

Collection Details:

Creator/Collector: Henry Waring Ball and others.
Date(s): 1860; 1869-1870.
Size: 0.10 cubic feet.
Language(s): English.
Processed by: MDAH staff; Reprocessed by Laura Heller, 2023.
Provenance: Gift from Hebe Crittenden of Greenville, MS, and Dan L. Smythe of Leland, MS, on August 23, 1976; Z/U/1976.045.
Repository: Archives & Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives & History.

Rights and Access:

Access restrictions: Collection is open for research.

Publication rights: Copyright assigned to the MDAH. All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to Reference Services. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the MDAH as the owner of the physical items and as the owner of the copyright in items created by the donor. Although the copyright was transferred by the donor, the respective creator may still hold copyright in some items in the collection. For further information, contact Reference Services.

Copyright Notice: This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17, U.S. Code).

Preferred citation: Henry Waring Ball Letters (Z/1842), Mississippi Department of Archives & History.

See also:
Henry Waring Ball Typescripts (Z/0324), Mississippi Department of Archives & History.
Henry Waring Ball Diaries (Z/1841), Mississippi Department of Archives & History.

Biography:

Henry Waring Ball was born to Lavinia Bateman (1830-) and Dr. Spencer Mottrom (1826-1888) on November 3, 1859, at Argyle Plantation near Greenville, Washington County, Mississippi. He was a descendant of Mary Ball Washington, mother of George Washington. Ball had one sister, Lavinia Ball Yerger (1860-1952), and two brothers, William Lee Ball (1864-1889) and Spencer Mottram Ball II (1861). The latter died in infancy.

Henry Waring Ball attended a preparatory school in Baltimore, Maryland, and later graduated from the law school of the University of Virginia. He practiced law at Clarendon, Arkansas, but later left because of the presence of yellow fever in the area. Ball moved to Greenville to be near his father, and he became a journalist and newspaper editor. During his career, he was associated with The Greenville Times, Greenville, Mississippi; The Vicksburg Daily American, Vicksburg, Mississippi; and The Meridian Star, Meridian, Mississippi. He was also the city and telegraph editor of The Vicksburg Herald. From the 1870s to the 1890s, Ball would comment in his diaries about his romantic relationships with specific men, including his neighbor William Armstrong Percy. Considering the societal conventions of the time, men were able to have same-sex emotional or physical relationships without the stigma of being homosexual, as author Benjamin E. Wise states in his book titled William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker (2014).

Henry Waring Ball married Eleanor Carter Randolph (1870-1955) on April 27, 1916, at Inness Hill, in Warrenton, Virginia. Ball retired from the newspaper business in 1919 to manage his plantation near Leland, Mississippi. He died in Greenville on June 21, 1934, and was buried in the Greenville Cemetery.

Scope and Content Note:

The collection contains the personal correspondence of Henry Waring Ball with various family members including his uncle William Henry Ball (1811-1861), his aunt Lettice Catesby Ball (1804-1888), and his relative James Flexner Ball (1816-1894). The Henry Waring Ball letters concern his education, leisure activities, family matters, and Ball family genealogy and heraldry. There are also letters not written to Ball, but written by and to other relatives.

Series Identification:

Series 1: Henry Waring Ball Correspondence, 1860; 1870.

A collection of letters written by Henry Waring Ball to his Aunt Lettice C. Ball of Haymarket, Prince William County, Virginia, while he was attending a preparatory school in Baltimore, Maryland. The letters discuss his education, leisure activities, and family matters.

Box 1, Folders 1-8

Series 2: Family Correspondence, 1869-1870.

Letters in this series are written by Charles Burgess Ball, George Washington Ball, and James Flexmer Ball to various recipients concerning the Ball family genealogy and heraldry. Also included is one letter from Lavinia Ball Yerger, sister of Henry Waring Ball, to their paternal aunt Charlotte Catherine Ball Carter concerning the illness of their younger brother.

Box 1, Folders 9-12

Correspondence Calendar:

Series 1: Henry Waring Ball Correspondence, 1860; 1870; n.d.

Series 2: Family Correspondence, 1869-1870.