Background
Ballard was born on October 16, 1759 in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Ballard was born on October 16, 1759 in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Ballard had little education.
Early in 1779 young Ballard and his father went to Boonesborough, Ky. One or both of them took part in Colonel Bowman's unsuccessful campaign against the Indians at Chillicothe. They returned to Virginia in the fall, but in the following spring young Ballard was again in Kentucky, and it is probable that his father and the rest of the family arrived at the same time. The son's early life was one of toil and hardship and an eager quest for danger. At a time, says his eulogist, Colonel Humphrey Marshall, when most Kentuckians were primarily concerned in getting land, young Ballard had devoted himself to the cause of protecting the settlements from Indians. In 1781 he was with Gen. George Rogers Clark in the indecisive attack on the Pickaway towns in Ohio, where he was wounded. In the same year, in the disastrous battle on Long Run (in the present county of Jefferson) he escaped by killing an Indian and fleeing on his victim's horse. On the following day he was one of a party that renewed the fight and was again a survivor of a defeat.
In 1782 he was once more with Clark in an attack on the Pickaway towns, which this time was successful. It was probably in the following winter that he married Elizabeth Williamson, a woman of great courage and the survivor of an Indian massacre at Lynn Station in September 1781, in which her father and one of her brothers were killed. In 1786 he served as a spy with Clark in the expedition against the Indians on the Wabash. The Ballards with others settled near the present Shelbyville in 1787, and here on March 31 of the following year they were attacked by Indians. The father, stepmother and several children were killed, but Ballard by a heroic defense, in which he was effectively aided by his wife, succeeded in withdrawing the survivors. The next five years seem to have been uneventful, but in 1793 he joined Gen. Wayne, taking part in the campaign which virtually ended with the victory at Fallen Timbers, August 20, 1794.
From 1795 until 1811 Ballard lived on his Shelby County farm, during this time serving five terms in the Kentucky legislature. He fought at Tippecanoe, and in the following year, on the declaration of war against England, he organized and was made captain of a company in Colonel John Allen's regiment, subsequently attaining the rank of major. In the defeat at Raisin River he was twice wounded and made a prisoner, but escaped the Indian massacre that followed. On his release he returned to his farm. He died at his home, leaving many descendants in Shelby and Henry counties.
The regard in which he and his first wife were held by their fellow citizens is attested by the act of the Kentucky legislature in the winter of 1853-54 in providing for the reinterment of their remains in the State Cemetery at Frankfort. On November 8, 1854, the bodies were reburied with imposing ceremonies.
He was a man of action, and he possessed to an exceptional degree the qualities needful on the frontier - alertness, courage, fortitude, and patient endurance.
Ballard married three times. He and his first wife Elizabeth Williamson were the parents of seven children. Elizabeth died in 1827, and he married Diana Matthews in 1833. Diana death in 1835, in 1841 Ballard married Elizabeth Weaver Garrett.