Born in Logan County, Ohio, Dec. 21, 1817. Mr. Ballinger married Miss Mary Devore, of Champaign County, Ohio, June 8, 1837, and to their union were born three children. She died April 25, 1845, at the age of twenty-four years. The following autumn, Mr. Ballinger married Mrs. Lydia A. Hildreth, of the village of Brandon, Knox Co., Ohio, with whom he lived thirty-six years. They had three children. In 1850 the family moved to Iowa, and made their first permanent home in Oskaloosa. Mr. Ballinger organized a Universalist society in the year 1851. The society numbered some fifty or more, and had preaching once a month for several years. Mr. Ballinger then located on a piece of land in Mahaska County that he had owned for some time, and improved a farm, preaching at various country places, mostly in school houses, working hard at the same time, improving land and farming. In 1861 he moved on his present farm six miles north of Oskaloosa. In 1867 he was elected to the Legislature and served through the 12th General Assembly as member of the House. He made an independent member conscientious in all his acts too much so to be trammeled by party tactics. He had sufficient manhood not to join in the bitter and uncalled for tirade of partisans against Andrew Johnson as manifest by a majority of the members of the Legislature.
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