Ball, Dr. C. W.

 From Biographical and Historical Memoires of Louisiana, volume 2, p.260.
Submitted by Mike Miller

Among the people of West Feliciana as well as the surrounding parishes, the name that heads this sketch is by no means an unfamiliar one, for since he attained his twenty-first year he has been active and successfully occupied in the prosecution of his chosen profession, and during this time his career as a practitioner and-thorough student of medicine has won for him no less a reputation than does his personal characteristics as a citizen and friend. He was born in Louisiana, February 2, 1855, a son of William and Julia (Wilson) Ball, the former a native of the state of Louisiana, whose ancestors for many years back have been residents of the South. The mother's people were from the state of New York.

William Ball was a druggist by calling, but in the latter part of his life followed the occupation of planting. He followed the former calling in Bayou Sara from 1855 to 1860, in Shreveport from 1860 to 1865, and from 1860 to 1873 was in a wholesale and retail drug establishment in New Orleans, belonging to Ball, Lyond & Co. From 1873 to 1876 his attention was devoted to sugar planting quite extensively in West Feliciana parish, La., where he died in 1876.

Dr. C. W. Ball attended the public school at New Orleans up to the age of about fifteen years, from which time until he was eighteen he was an attendant of Sewanee college, Tennessee. He then entered Tulane university at New Orleans, from which he was graduated after two sessions at the age of twenty-one, having taken a post-graduate course. He at once opened up an office for the practice of his profession at New Orleans. but one year later moved to Alexandria, La., at which place he spent eighteen months. Immediately following this he returned to New Orleans, but after one year's practice at this place yellow fever broke out and he was employed by the Howard association and sent to Green Junction, Tenn. After the scourge abated he returned to New Orleans, and in 1879 came to the plantation in this parish where he is following the practice of his profession and is engaged in cotton planting.

He is interested in a plantation of 1,500 acres, and has about one-half of this land under cultivation. He handles some 400 bales of cotton yearly. He was a parish coroner from 1880 to 1884, when he was elected to the lower house of the state legislature, being honored by a re-election in 1888, during which time he was on the committees of health, quarantine, charitable institutions and corporations. The Doctor is unmarried. He is one of the substantial business men of the parish and is sociable and hospitable.