Sep 27, 2018 - Sale 2486

Sale 2486 - Lot 407

Price Realized: $ 812
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(WASHINGTON, GEORGE.) Photograph of Washington's great-grandnephew and look-alike, the Oregon Indian fighter Ebenezer Burgess Ball. Albumen photograph, 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches, mounted on the verso of a detached title page of the 1885 pamphlet "The Maternal Ancestry and Nearest Kin of Washington" by George Washington Ball, which is in turn mounted to a scrapbook leaf; inked caption below photograph. Np, circa 1885

Additional Details

Ebenezer Burgess Ball (1817-1900) was a great-grandson of Colonel Charles Washington, brother of the president. He went west as a pioneer settler in Oregon in the 1850s, supplied miners, and fought in the Rogue River Wars. When he came back east, he hoped to work as a watchman at the new Washington Monument, but did not get the job. "Major Ebenezer Burgess Ball is almost the personification in physical appearance of his kinsman George Washington. . . . He has had a photograph taken of himself attired in the old Continental uniform, which makes his resemblance to Washington still more marked, and he sells these . . . to eke out his living"--Hayden's Virginia Genealogies, pages 134-5.