In 1880 in Louisville, KY, two brothers (my husband's 3rd cousins 4x) named Samuel Thruston Ballard and Charles Thruston Ballard joined with a third partner, James Jones, and formed the Jones, Ballard and Ballard Company. They started their first flour mill behind the Ballard family residence on Walnut Street in Louisville. By 1883, Jones had left the firm, the name was changed to Ballard and Ballard and the milling operations moved to new headquarters at 912 East Broadway, where it became, at one time, the largest flour mill in the world. During World War I, they were contracted by the governments of England and France to supply flour to those countries.
While these may be unusual marketing tools for flour milled in Kentucky, it served two purposes: it definitely made their product stand out from all the others, and it pleased Samuel Thruston Ballard, who was a collector of antiques and had a passion for Egyptology, which leads to an interesting side story.
In 1904, Samuel visited the World Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, where the Egyptian mummy Tchaenhotep was on display. He could not resist. He purchased it and donated it to the Louisville Free Pubic Library Museum. The mummy is believed to have been a young woman between the ages of 25 and 35 at her death, and was buried in Egypt's Valley of the Queens. Discovered in 1903 and improbably making her way to Louisville, she was then unfortunate enough to get caught in the floodwaters of the infamous 1937 Ohio River flood. Her resting place of the library's museum suffered heavy damage, and Tchaentotep (which ironically means "one who is content") was crushed when a piano landed on her as she swirled in the floodwaters. She was eventually restored, and currently resides at the Kentucky Science Center in downtown Louisville. She is still, after nearly 120 years, providing elementary students in the surrounding area their first glimpse of a real Egyptian mummy.
In 1931, the company acquired a patent from another local baker named Lively Willoughby. This patent was for a soon-to-be-famous convenience food, the canned biscuit. Ballard and Ballard held the patent until the company was purchased by Pillsbury in 1951, and the rest is culinary history.
The company also produced flour under different brand names as well as pancake flour and chicken feed. We have a nice collection of these items.
But while their milling company was important in its own right, the Ballard brothers were much more than that. Samuel Ballard served as Kentucky's lieutenant governor from 1913 - 1922, under Gov. Edwin P. Morrow. He was also Vice President of both the Louisville National Banking Company and the United States Trust Company. He served as Chairman of the National Commission on the Cost of Living and Domestic Economy of the Council of National Defense, and was appointed the nation's National Food Administrator. He and his wife, Sunshine Harris Ballard, married in 1883 and had four children, only one of whom, Mary Harris Ballard, survived into adulthood.
Charles Thruston Ballard was the first president of Ballard and Ballard. He also served as Chairman of the Board for Alderman, President of both the Louisville Board of Trade and the Pendinnis Club, and as a director in the Fidelity Columbia Trust Company, the Union National Bank, the Federal Chemical Company and the Louisville Railway Company. He married Modeste Emilina Breaux in 1878, and the couple had eight children. Charles died in 1918 and his presidency of Ballard and Ballard passed to his brother Samuel.
Between 1909 and 1911, Charles built a magnificent home overlooking the Ohio River and named it Bushy Park after his great-great-grandfather Armistead Churchill's Virginia homestead. At his death in 1918 the house was purchased by Judge Robert Worth Bingham, owner of the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Louisville Times and radio (and now TV) station WHAS.
A third brother, Rogers Clark Thruston Ballard, was not involved in the flour mill but was a prominent Louisville citizen and businessman in his own right. A graduate of Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, he worked as an engineer for several companies before retiring from business in 1909 to dedicate his time to his true passion - history. He is credited with salvaging and restoring Louisville's Filson Historical Society (an excellent resource for genealogy research!) after the death of its president in 1913. He served as its president for over 30 years, contributing hugely to it both financially and in terms of donated collections. As a genealogist, he legally changed his name in 1884 from Rogers Clark Ballard to Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston, thus taking his mother's maiden name as his own surname to preserve it; unfortunately, he never married nor had children, so the line died out in spite of his intentions.
The brothers had a sister, Abigail Churchill Ballard, who died at the age of 20 in 1874. She is still a work in progress, as there is disagreement as to whether she married, or if she died in Louisville or in France. I'm still looking for evidence for this lovely girl who was also my husband's 3rd cousin 4x.
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