In 1772, when she was around sixty-five years old, Mary Ball Washington moved to 1200 Charles Street in the charming town of Fredericksburg. It was not far from the property that she had managed most of her adult life, being only two miles away from the land that is now called Ferry Farm.
Mary Ball Washington was the only daughter of Joseph Ball and Mary Johnson. This was a second marriage for both of her parents, and Mary was the only child of that union.
Mary’s father was an English-born justice, who became an important member of the planter class in Lancaster County Virginia. Born in 1649 in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in the same year that Charles I was executed by Oliver Cromwell, Ball would have spent his first years in a Puritan Theocracy, in an England where singing, dancing, or any form of entertainment were banned. With the arrival of Charles I’s son Charles II, in 1660, the pendulum swung the other way, for Charles II was notorious for his extravagant dress, his gambling, and his mistresses (he had at least fourteen illegitimate children).
What young Joseph Ball would have made of this is hard to say. His own father, William, moved to the colonies in 1657 before the accession of Charles II, to become a trader and planter, eventually settling in Lancaster County in the community of Millenbeck.
Joseph Ball did not follow his father. Perhaps his (mother’s?) family thought him too young. After all, he would have been only seven going on eight in 1657. And so he remained in England until the 1670s. Of course we do not know the exact date that he left England. However, he was in Lancaster County Virginia by 1680, when his father died.
Like many young men who have to make their way, Joseph Ball did not marry until he was in his thirties. His marriage must have occurred around 1682 – when he would have been around 33 years old – because his first child was born in 1683. HIs wife Elizabeth Romney gave him five children before dying some time in the early 1700s.
Joseph Ball’s most famous child Mary, was born in around 1708, and so he must have married his second wife Mary Johnson shortly after his first wife’s death.
By this time, the children of his first marriage were all adults, and presumably settled. So when he died in 1711 at the age of 62, it was his youngest – four-year-old Mary – who bore the brunt of that unfortunate event. When Mary’s mother died ten years later in 1721, she was made a ward of George Erskine, whose sister Jane had married into the Washington family. Which is how Mary Ball met Augustine Washington, and how our first president George Washington (1732-1799) came to be.
