Weekly Word

Thoughts on Reading and Books (Part 17) MERRY CHRISTMAS!

In my last column I presented the historical context for these wonderful and rare books by Timothy Horton Ball, which are available at the Cedar Lake library. (Most of these books are facsimile reprints; however, some are valuable first editions. Can you imagine that? Treat them well.) Hopefully you’ll have an extra day this week to read.

Lake County, Indiana, from 1834 to 1872 / By Rev. T. H. Ball; Chicago: J W Goodspeed , 1873. This is T.H. Ball’s first book, what a gem! If he wrote nothing else we still would be forever indebted to him for this singular record of early Cedar Lake and Lake County. As far as I’m concerned this book should be required reading by every Lake County high school history student. Subsequent historians, when they wrote about Lake County, stole–that’s not too harsh a statement, since they hardly credited Ball–extensively from this volume. Again, it’s rare for a county to have an early, thorough historical record like this, but we do. Ball writes about Lake County’s geographical and physical features, Squatter life, the Pottawatomies, the beginnings of our towns, the Civil War, Settler Sketches and numerous and interesting incidents, like the prospect of the explorer LaSalle visiting Cedar Lake in 1680.

The Lake of the Red Cedars : or, Will It Live? by Y.N.L. [Timothy Horton Ball] Crown Point, Indiana, 1880. The book is more autobiographical than the title would seem to indicate. This is Ball’s most intimate history, revealing the inner man: spiritual and emotional wrestlings from childhood through his early senior years. I only wish the veil was lifted even higher; still while keeping in harmony with literary styles of the time this is a transparent view of his life from 1836 to 1880 as seen through the lenses of the Cedar Lake church and the Baptist movement in Lake County. The more I read this book the more I appreciate it. Besides his personal and spiritual struggles there are the occasional anecdotes that are historical golden nuggets, e.g., when the Ball children were preparing their home for the maternal grandmother’s move to Indiana, “they sent to New England for some dandelion seed that these familiar yellow blossoms might be around their home, reminding them all of the Connecticut valley meadows.” And on January 24, 1846, when young Fanny Warriner received Christ as her Savior she was baptized, “The lake [Cedar Lake] was covered with thick ice, but a font was soon arranged by cutting through the ice. Steps were placed leading down into the clear water…winter immersions….” From today’s perspective I don’t know what’s more shocking to our system the winter iced baptisms or clear Cedar Lake water. One would think that there would have been a far greater likelihood of summer baptisms in the future, but no, the baptismal records in this volume indicate as many, if not more, happened as the Spirit moved in wintertime. One final note, Timothy Horton Ball thought his name a long one so usually his books are by T. H. Ball or Rev. T. H. Ball; however, for this book, and only this one, he did not even use his initials, but instead his finals: Y. N. L. Wouldn’t it have been interesting to have talked with him to discover his deep motive for that?

More T. H. Ball recommendations next time.

Last updated: December 23, 2007 @ 1:00 am