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By Root 1659 0

James Garfield. He had gone to Buffalo in 1850 to preach on the docks. He found a vacant building and built a church. Over the years, while he and his wife raised five children, he earned a national reputation as a theologian and author of The Story of Jesus. He was also in a roundabout way responsible for one of the great industrial fortunes in American history. In 1880, Ball had loaned his enterprising nephews Frank and Edmund $200 to go into business selling tin containers for storing paint, varnishes, and kerosene. The company came to be called Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company and became a huge success when it added glass jars for canning fruits to its production line. Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, is named after the family.

George Ball knew Grover Cleveland. In 1882 he had gone to see then-Mayor Cleveland to request a donation to build a new church. Cleveland wrote a check for $50. Politically, however, Ball and Cleveland were polar opposites. Ball had served as a delegate to the first Republican National Convention in 1856 and had been active in the antislavery movement. That Cleveland had dodged the Civil War draft and was now threatening to end a quarter century of unbroken Republican rule in the White House since Abraham Lincoln’s momentous victory in 1860 made Ball ideologically prepared to think the worst of Cleveland.

After Ball had listened to everything Lewis had to say about Cleveland and Maria Halpin, and taken notes, he was determined to investigate the story. And he had plenty of leads to pursue.

Ball went to see William Flint and Henry Kent, the owners of the Flint & Kent department store where Maria Halpin had once worked. The last thing in the world the merchants needed was to get caught up in a sex scandal, but they did confirm for Ball the essence of Maria’s claim that she had been let go after becoming pregnant with Cleveland’s child.

Next, Ball sought out Maria Baker and the attorney Milo Whitney. He also spoke with Dr. William Ring, medical director of the Providence Lunatic Asylum where Maria had been placed following her seizure by two off-duty Buffalo police officers. So far, everything was checking out.

After that, Ball went to Vine Alley in Buffalo in search of a Mrs. McLean. She had been Grover Cleveland’s janitress at the Weed Block apartment building, where he’d lived before moving to Albany. Vine Alley—or the Alley as it was called in local parlance—had a notorious reputation, second only to Canal Street’s, as a tenderloin district of infamy. It was claimed that more bottles of wine were opened nightly on Vine Alley than on any other street in America, with the exception of Broadway in Manhattan. Thunderbolt Smith, a boxer of national repute, ran a popular saloon on the Alley.

Vice was more or less condoned by police, so for his personal safety, George Ball asked another minister, E. S. Hubbell, to accompany him. These two elderly gentlemen of the cloth poking around disreputable Vine Alley must have made an amusing spectacle, but they managed to find Mrs. McLean’s apartment. They asked the cleaning lady what she knew about Cleveland, but she had nothing incriminating to offer.

Ball followed every lead he got but could not locate Maria Halpin. No one seemed to know where she was living, only that she had left Buffalo in shame and had not been heard from in eight years. Not even Mrs. Baker knew how to find her. It was a huge gap in his investigation, but at this point, Ball believed he had enough on Cleveland to convene a summit of the city’s leading Christian ministers. It was an extraordinary gathering. Thirty clergymen from every denomination, including the Catholic diocese, listened in shocked incredulity as Ball laid out the evidence he had collected. Rumors about out-of-control drinking had chased Cleveland since his time as Erie County sheriff. His bachelorhood also made him suspect. But they couldn’t have expected this. Ball argued that they could not stand by while this depraved character Cleveland ran for the highest office in the land.

As the committee