Several years ago I wrote a blog post about the two Ballou ministers, James H. and his son Willard S., who served the Athens congregation in the late 1890s.  At that time, I noted that I had been unable to find out what became of Willard Ballou after about 1910.

As it turns out, I was not the only one who didn’t know where he was, at least for a period of time.  No one knew where he was for eight months in 1914 and 1915.

In 1914 Willard Ballou, who had resigned from the ministry in 1905, lived in Binghamton, NY, where Willard had had a retail grocery business for at least four years.  He and his family apparently lived within walking distance of the local Universalist church.

On Sunday evening, Nov. 8, 1914, Ballou told his wife that he was not going to go to the evening church service because the weather looked “stormy.”  But later, according to his four-year-old daughter, he slipped out the back door without telling anyone where he was going.  He had about $500 (equivalent to about $12,000 today) in his pocket, which was apparently intended as payment to one of his wholesale grocery suppliers.

Ballou didn’t come home that evening.  He disappeared without a trace and was feared dead.  He finally turned up eight months later – alive and penniless – in Charleston, S. C.  He had apparently experienced an extended period of amnesia.

After his return to Binghamton in July, 1915, he gave the following account of the last several days of his absence:

When his memory finally returned, he was being held captive by two men and a woman in an isolated cabin “in the wilds of South Carolina.”  Once his captors realized that Ballou had become conscious of his identity, they wanted to get rid of him.  They blindfolded Ballou and put him in an automobile.  They drove through the night on what Ballou remembered as “an interminable rough road,” stopping at daylight at a house.  Ballou was kept inside the house all day, and, when night came again, they resumed their journey.

At dawn on the second day, the driver of the car stopped and told Ballou to get out, saying that, if he walked straight ahead, he would reach Charleston in an hour.

When Ballou got to Charleston, he wrote a letter to his wife Lelah, explaining where he was and requesting money to pay for travel home.  The $500 he had had when he left home was gone, though he still had his valuable pocket watch.

The location of the cabin and the identity of his captors was, as far as I can tell, never determined.

After Ballou’s story was made known, there was speculation that a car accident had caused his amnesia, though no car accident was reported at the time of his disappearance.

During Ballou’s absence, his creditors, assuming that Ballou was dead, had settled accounts, accepting 43 cents on the dollar to cover his debts.  Ballou reappeared just two weeks after the settlement had been finalized, which several of the creditors thought was a suspicious coincidence.

Ballou was probably bankrupt or just about so when he returned to Binghamton.  The grocery store had been sold while he was away.  In 1920 he and his family still lived in Binghamton; Willard worked as a “buffer” in a “copper works.”

Willard and Lelah were legally separated in 1930.  They reconciled in 1934 and lived together for the rest of their lives.

After Lelah Ballou’s death in 1954, Willard went to live with his daughter in Groton, NY.  He died there in 1959.