By Roslyn Ryan
Editor

“[Just after the Civil War]  Ballsville was the place.  I know you never heard of it.  It had six families then, two small stores, and one blacksmith-shop.  Only five families now, and no blacksmith-shop.  But Ballsville was, and is, a good place to be born, especially when the birthplace is a big farmhouse one mile away.  The sun comes up over Richmond every morning, forty miles to the East.  The mantle of night is spread reverently over Appomattox every evening, fifty miles to the West.  No, Ballsville is not a bad place in which to be born.  ‘Tis really in the middle of things.”

— From “This is My Story” by John Jeter Hurt, 1957

Just in case you’re interested, you can actually Google Ballsville.

You can find a map of it – even a slightly limited Wikipedia entry on it –  if that’s what you happen to be looking for.
As far as pinpointing its location, however, that’s probably about the best you’re going to do. Because the one way not to find out where Ballsville is, is to ask.

In fact, asking most Ballsville residents where Ballsville actually starts – or where Belona or Tobaccoville stops, depending on your orientation or allegiance – is the fastest way to get yourself very, very confused. 

Cartographically speaking, “Ballsville starts in the big curve [on Route 13, past Belona] and ends at the straight stretch,” says Page Clark, an avid historian and lifelong Ballsville resident, whose family has been part of the community since before the Civil War.

Clark’s father was the community’s Post Master for a time, and she and her two sisters grew up hearing his tales of Ballsville life in the early 1900s.

For a place that doesn’t seem to have any exact boundaries, Ballsville has a history as proud as any you are likely to find in Powhatan.

Once a thriving, self-sufficient community, it boasted at least three stores, a blacksmith shop, a railroad stop and a post office.

Most families grew what they needed, shared what they had, and purchased whatever they couldn’t raise themselves from local shopkeepers. Children played ball in the streets, remembered Clark, and everyone knew everyone else.

Still, idyllic as it was, few who grew up outside Ballsville likely knew of its charms.

“The little village qualified for distinction but never got it,” wrote Clark’s great uncle John Jeter Hurt in his memoirs in 1957. “Mapmakers glance at it and pass on… Ballsville has always rubbed elbows with distinction, without actually possessing it.”

Legend has it that the community’s name is somehow connected to the famous Ball family (Martha Washington, George’s wife, was a Ball) but a more likely explanation may be that the name came from Isham Ball, a long-time tavern owner in the area.

* * *

Small as it is, Ballsville counts a number of notable Powhatanians among its current and former residents.

Powhatan County Fire Chief Rick Butcher lives in Ballsville just up the road from where Benjamin Wilson Coleman, once the Chief Justice of the Nevada Supreme Court, was born in 1861.

Brian Ritzberg, Jr., the only soldier buried in Powhatan after giving his life in Iraq, was laid to rest in the cemetery of Mt. Pero, the same church the first black female to earn an MBA from Harvard, Lillian Lambert, still attends whenever she is back in Powhatan.

Lambert seems to look at Ballsville the way you’d look at any member of your own family: two parts love, one part frustration and one part tolerance.

The place was never perfect – plenty of young people daydreamed of escaping to more exciting places, she remembers – but it was home.

Her memories are filled with church suppers and homecoming revivals, and summer days spent running from house to house with friends and chatting with neighbors.

“There were no movies, no library,” she recalls. “We had to entertain ourselves.”

* * *

In the Army during WWII, fellow soldiers called Porter Smith “Rev.”

These days the Ballsville native still attends the church he has been a member of all his life. And he can still remember what it felt like to be a young man, serving half a world away, so far away from the only home he had ever known.

One day, he recalls, “I got on my hands and knees and said if God would let me get back to Ballsville, I’d never leave.”

If Smith was eager just to get back to Ballsville, there were plenty of other young people during those years headed in the opposite direction.

For so many in Lambert’s generation, the call of the outside world – and the jobs and educational opportunities it offered – was too much to resist.

These days, however, some of those who left Ballsville in their younger years are moving back, seeing the gentle rolling hills as the perfect place to raise their own families or enjoy their retirement.

Living alongside those who have always called Ballsville home – and those who are rediscovering the community after many years away – are the newcomers, those drawn to the area for the peace and tranquility living a bit off the beaten path provides. 

Among those who have fallen in love with the area is Powhatan County Administrator Carolyn Bishop.

“Sometimes I come home late at night after a Board meeting and just stare up at the stars in the sky since there is nothing like the dark you get out in the country. I have often said that I love living in Powhatan and I adore being part of the Ballsville family.”

Certainly the Ballsville of today would look shockingly different to those who walked along its tree-lined roads a century ago; now a quiet bedroom community, the community is now barely discernible from the other bedroom communities that dot the county.

Lambert just shook her head during a drive through the area last year, as she talked about how much had changed, and how some things never would.

“It was just a sleepy little town,” she laughed. “But somehow it survived.”