Harlan Hoge Ballard

Born in Athens, Ohio, on May 26, 1853, he was the son of the Rev. Addison Ballard and Julia Perkins Ballard, a writer of nature books and temperance fiction. He studied in Athens and Detroit and graduated from Williams College in 1874.

After college, he worked in education as principal of Lenox High School and then Lenox Academy. In 1875 he founded the Agassiz Association, a group devoted to the study of natural science, especially for young people, and it grew into a large national movement. He later edited The Swiss Cross, the association’s magazine, as well as the New York Observer.

His career also included many years in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he served as librarian of the Berkshire Athenaeum for 46 years and was appointed the first curator of the Berkshire Museum of Natural History and Art in 1903. Alongside that work, he published a number of books, including The Three Kingdoms, World of Nature, Open Sesame, One Thousand Blunders in English, and a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. He died in Pittsfield on February 18, 1934.