Edward Ball (1888 – 1981)

Edward Ball, born in Ball’s Neck, Virginia, on March 21, 1888, and educated in a one room schoolhouse, became one of Florida’s most influential and controversial citizens. His rise in the business world began when he met Alfred I. du Pont, a successful industrialist and banker, who became his brother-in-law, confidante, and business partner. (du Pont was married to Ball’s sister, Jessie.)

Ball arguably owned more land, banks, and railroads than any one else in Florida. He was a political force of nature—recognized as the power behind the “The Pork Chop Gang,” a group of rural north Florida politicians that arose during McCarthyism in the 1950s, the financier of Senator Claude Pepper’s defeat in a 1950 re-election bid, and a man locked in a power struggle with Pepper throughout the 1950s-1960s that helped determine the future of Florida. He was an enormously rich man with little interest in material possessions.

In the 1920s, Ball--on behalf of his brother-in-law and the newly formed St. Joe Paper Company (now St. Joe Corporation)--started purchasing large tracts (over a million acres) of land in the panhandle. When du Pont died in 1935, Ball became trustee of the du Pont estate worth $34 million, and continued land purchases in zealous fashion throughout the 1940s and 1950's, sometimes for "mere dollars an acre."

Ball’s greatest land acquisitions reached from Tallahassee to Pensacola, with a paper mill built in Port St. Joe that operated from 1936 until 1996. This enterprise brought a significant number of jobs to the area along with a devastating environmental price tag due to pollution from sulfurous exhaust and dioxins, depletion of water reserves in the underlying aquifer, and replacement of millions of acres of longleaf pine stands with slash pines for the mill. This led the Department of Interior to call parts of the region a Critically Endangered Ecosystem.

Ball purchased the Wakulla Springs Lodge and surrounding 4,000 acres in 1937. In the mid 1960s, he donated land to the Florida State University for the marine laboratory, which was completed in 1968 and named in his honor.

Ball died in 1981 in New Orleans at 92 years old. He bequeathed most of his fortune to The Nemours Foundation, which was started by du Pont to care for the sick and disabled.

Bibliography

Danese, T. D. 2000. Claude Pepper and Ed Ball: Politics, Purpose, and Power. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Hullverson, R. The Ed Ball Story.

Mason, R. K., and Harrison. 1976. Confusion to the Enemy: A biography of Ed Ball. Dodd Mead Publisher

Ziewitz, Kathryn Ziewitz and June Wiaz. 2004. Green Empire: The St. Joe Company and the Remaking of Florida's Panhandle. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.