How Florida Was Developed 03 — EATING FLORIDA

ED BALL—Exemplar of Modern Florida Development

In other circumstances it might have been a tremendous uphill struggle to come up with a person to rival Henry Flagler as THE Florida entrepreneur of modern times. But life is stranger than fiction in so many ways.

Some of the most intriguing accounts dealing with Florida’s modern history are derived from the life of Ed Ball, a distant relative of George Washington. Ball, a high school dropout from Ball’s Neck, Virginia, was part of a family of genteel southerners rendered dirt poor, like thousands of others, by the Civil War. But Ed was clearly different from the herd and that difference was more than the king-sized chip he carried on his shoulder throughout his long life.

A tough banty-rooster who asked no quarter and gave none in return, Ball was driven to prove his abilities to the world. His goal was to succeed no matter what obstacles were in his path. Before his sister married well and helped her brother start his relentless climb up the ladder, Ball was a very successful though dissatisfied salesman of law books, office furniture, cash registers, and then automobiles. Despite making a great deal more money than most above-average salesmen, Ball was regarded by his cultured and wealthy friends simply as an upstart, near-do-well drummer straining and striving to improve his lot vis-à-vis his social superiors. Incidentally, for those readers unfamiliar with the economic history of the early 20th Century, the word ‘drummer’ was derived from drum-shaped containers in which commercial goods were transported across country by rail and ship and indicated a salesman of lower- to middle-class standing. Definitely Ball was below the salt.

After his sister, Jessie, had the astounding luck to marry Alfred I. duPont, one of the wealthiest and most successful industrialists in the country, Ball recognized his golden opportunity. He badgered Jessie without ceasing until she persuaded her new husband to appoint Ed his business manager. As fate would have it, the marriage itself turned out to not have been made in heaven but the relationship between duPont and Ed Ball was. At the time, duPont was one of the largest stockholders in both DuPont Chemicals and General Motors. And it turned out Ed Ball had a true genius for making money. DuPont and Ball, recognizing tremendous opportunities in the Florida real estate crash of 1926 and also at the beginning of the Depression, began picking up large chunks of property dirt cheap, buying farms, woodlands, railroads, and one bank after another.

As an indication of the enormous pile of money duPont controlled, during the Crash of 1926 he started construction of his new home, Epping Forest, on a 58-acre estate south of Jacksonville,. The mansion itself, with approximately 15,000 square feet, contained 25 grand rooms and was a unique mixture of Gothic, Mediterranean Revival, and Baroque architectural styles. Today, it has been completely restored and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Oh, yes, how could I neglect to tell you that it is now owned by and home to the Epping Forest Yacht Club. And Jeeves, high tea and biscuits will be served at 4:00. Promptly. After we return from the regatta.

From the 1920s through the tumultuous 1930s, Ball and duPont literally assembled a financial empire, starting in the Panhandle and northern Florida and then extending into the main part of the State. In one justly famous deal, Ball optioned over 430,000 acres in the Panhandle for a song. Shortly before he either had to renew the option or buy the land Ball was able to sell 190,000 acres to the federal government for Apalachicola National Forest through his many Washington political contacts. The money he received from the government paid for the entire 430,000 acres with $70,000 left over as his immediate profit. Not to mention the remaining 240,000 acres, which he eventually turned to considerable economic advantage. Quite a nifty piece of economic legerdemain during the Great Depression.

Upon Alfred’s death, Ball became sole Trustee of the Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust. He quickly turned the Trust into Florida’s largest landowner, largest banker, largest railroad, and largest tax payer. In the process, good old Ed ran duPont’s original $40 million estate (that was its Depression-day value) up to an estimated $2 billion. In this extraordinary run, which stretched to 1981, Ball acquired 31 banks, owned almost two million acres of Florida land, bought Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad when it went bankrupt in the mid-1930s, two sugar refineries, the St. Joe Paper Company, and 23 cardboard box plants in the U.S. and Europe. The astounding growth of the duPont Trust under Ed Ball’s management ranks as one of the most remarkable feats in the financial history of the United States and dominated the economic development of Florida, then and now.

Ball, who proved himself a financial wizard in a viciously competitive circle of like-minded men, was if anything even more skilled at putting solid political deals together with politicians on both sides of the aisle. Throughout his long life Ball was vilified by his opponents, with more truth than he would ever admit, as a racist, union-busting, rabid anti-Communist whose only concern in life was making more money. Ball’s favorite toast was “Confusion to the enemy.” And everyone who wasn't an active friend was his enemy. At one time he even suggested to newspaper reporters in a public comment that the then governor of Florida, who happened to disagree with him about a political matter, was on an LSD trip. And when President Kennedy called the principals in the long-lasting railroad strike to a meeting in Washington because of the strike’s deleterious effects on NASA’s space program at Cape Canaveral, Ball refused to attend, telling reporters that he couldn't accommodate the President because he had a dental appointment that day. Today, wealth, power, and arrogance like that are difficult to imagine only if you've never heard of Donald Trump.

Ball, who died  in 1981 at the age of 93 as one of the richest men in the country, had over the years acquired a richly deserved reputation as a mean-spirited and cantankerous old man. As an example, in 1970, after the death of his sister, Jessie, who was the sole beneficiary of the Alfred I. duPont Trust, two of the Trust’s trustees, including duPont’s grandson, Alfred Dent, tried to have the Trust’s investments re-structured to comply with duPont’s will. Alfred duPont had stipulated that, on his wife’s death, the income derived from the Estate would go to the crippled children and elderly poor of the State of Delaware. Ball proved exactly how deserved was his reputation for meanness by suing to void that provision of his brother-in-law’s will and by continuing to accrue assets rather than pay out benefits to the elderly poor and crippled children of Delaware. Ball made Ebenezer Scrooge at his worst appear kindly and generous.

Not once in all his long life was Ed Ball accused of being a nice guy. But what he accomplished can’t be denied no matter how much you detest his mean-spirited and self-aggrandizing actions. As a direct result of his personal battle to dominate the State financially he dragged Florida into the present simply by outsmarting and crushing the opposition. Like him or despise him, most objective observers would acknowledge that his reputation as the leading entrepreneur of modern Florida is a reflection of economic reality.