While research being done on this Ballard family, it is becoming more clear about what several of them did in order to support themselves and their families. In other words, their occupation.

Just like current day, not everyone was a farmer or plantation owner. Yes, they did have to farm and hunt the land they owned, this was to provide food for themselves though.

It has become clear that Elijah Sr. and his sons were Millwright’s. They were quite successful in this occupation and he was considered a pioneer Millwright in what is now Kanawha Co., West Virginia. He built several horse and water powered mills of several types, grist mills, weaving and fulling mills.

The Millwright was America’s first industrial inventor. He was builder, banker, businessman and host to the countryside. When highways were no wider than today’s bridle paths, the first good roads were built to the mills. Where there was a mill site, there was a nucleus for a town. America had so many Millvilles, Milltowns, Milfords and other towns named after original mills, that the Post Office Department sponsored the changing of many such names to stop the confusion.

The careless Millwright’s life was a short one, and whether he was lifted aloft and thrown from a windmill, hit in the head by a spar or caught by his hand or clothing in the gigantic gears and ground up, his everyday work had to be as exacting and careful. Elijah Ballard Jr. was in fact killed while building a mill in Indiana.

Curtis and Larkin at one time were Fuller’s, likely working together.

Fulling was one in a sequence of important processes involved in the production of woolen cloth, and fulfilled two functions that were necessary for the proper finishing of the cloth, namely scouring, removing grease and dirt, consolidating the fibers of the fabric. Woven cloth straight from the loom has a rather open, loose texture and the woven threads needed closing or tightening. The fulling process intended to consolidate and thicken the structure of the fabric by knitting the fibers together more thoroughly and by shrinking them, which transformed the cloth from a loose ‘net’ of threads into a compact, tight, textural whole.

The pounding of the cloth by the stocks of a fulling mill created a great deal of noise and, along with the sound of the force of the water, a fulling mill could be heard from some distance. The occupation was very unpleasant and could be a dangerous one , the momentum of the machinery and if any clothing caught in the stocks, then a serious injury was the likely result.