When Samuel Ball died on December 14, 1845, at the age of eighty-one, he owned nine lots on Oak Island totaling thirty-six acres, roughly one hundred acres on the mainland opposite the island, and a small island called Hook Island in Mahone Bay. His home stood on Lot 25, where the stone foundation is still visible today. His will, dated October 1, 1841, and probated on January 5, 1846, listed among its witnesses a man named John Barkhouse Sr. Among its executors was Anthony Vaughan, the same family name as one of the three young men said to have discovered the Money Pit in 1795. Poll tax records listed Ball as a farmer. He raised cattle, grew cabbages, cut firewood, and fished. None of these occupations, individually or together, would seem to explain how a formerly enslaved man came to own more of Oak Island than any other person in its history.
Born into Bondage
Ball was born into slavery around 1764 on a plantation in South Carolina, possibly connected to the Wambaw branch of the Elias Ball family of Charleston, whose estates at Comingtee and elsewhere enslaved nearly four thousand people over the course of a century and a half. His early life is undocumented. What changed everything was a proclamation issued on November 7, 1775, by John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia. Facing open rebellion and reduced to roughly three hundred troops, Dunmore declared that any enslaved person belonging to a patriot master who took up arms for the Crown would be granted freedom. The proclamation was published across all thirteen colonies. Within a month, three hundred Black men had joined what became known as the Ethiopian Regiment. Over the course of the war, an estimated twenty thousand enslaved people sought freedom behind British lines.
Ward's Green-Coats
Ball was among them. He escaped the plantation and joined British forces in South Carolina under Lord Cornwallis before being transferred to the army of General Henry Clinton, then marching on New York. He was eventually assigned to the command of Major Thomas Ward, stationed at Bergen Point in New Jersey. Ward's unit, commonly known as the Green-Coats or the Loyal Refugee Volunteers, became notorious in the region. Alongside their official duties, the men staged raids throughout the surrounding countryside, confiscating rebel livestock, horses, and personal property and dividing the proceeds by rank. Contemporary accounts describe Ward as a vicious plunderer, and one particularly hostile letter noted that his associates were of the lowest character. Whether Ball participated in these raids or served only as a woodcutter, as some records indicate, his time under Ward may have left him with more resources than a typical soldier earning two to three pence per week.
Black Loyalist
When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, Ball was among the thousands of Black Loyalists who fled to British-held New York. In 1783, British commander Sir Guy Carleton negotiated certificates of freedom for those who had served, and Brigadier General Samuel Birch compiled the Book of Negroes, a register of some three thousand Black Loyalists granted passage to Nova Scotia. Ball arrived in Shelburne that year, at roughly nineteen years of age. The Black Loyalists who settled there founded Birchtown, which became the largest free Black settlement outside Africa at the time. But the promises of land and equality went largely unfulfilled. Black settlers received smaller plots than their white counterparts, waited years for allocations, and faced severe discrimination from fellow colonists, some of whom had brought their own enslaved people from the American states. After two years, Ball left Shelburne for Chester.
'Ball' name tag→
The Landowner
By 1787, Ball had purchased his first lot on Oak Island for eight pounds. According to the Lunenburg County Book of Deeds, Oak Island lots were the most expensive per acre in all of Mahone Bay. For the same sum, a buyer could have acquired more than twenty times the acreage on the mainland. The question of why Ball chose to pay a premium for land on a remote island rather than settle cheaply on the shore has never been answered. In 1790, he purchased Hook Island from Daniel Vaughan, brother to Anthony Vaughan Sr. and uncle of Anthony Vaughan Jr., one of the Money Pit discoverers, for five pounds. In 1798, he bought Lot 8 from Robert Melvin for six pounds. In 1809, he petitioned Justice of the Peace Thomas Thompson in Chester for the grant of Lot 32, a vacant four-acre parcel adjoining land he had already purchased. Thompson certified that he had known Ball for over twenty years and described him as an honest, sober, and industrious settler worthy of encouragement. The lot was granted. Over the following decades, Ball acquired lots 6, 7, 8, 24, 25, 26, 30, 31, and 32 on Oak Island, along with the mainland acreage and Hook Island.
Land Rich, Not Cash Rich
Some popular accounts have described Ball as one of the richest men in Nova Scotia at the time of his death. This claim does not hold up under scrutiny. It originates not from any historical record but from the writers of The Curse of Oak Island, and has since been repeated and circular-cited across dozens of websites as though it were established fact. The reality is more measured. Ball was land rich in a region where land was cheap. After American independence, many Planter settlers returned to the United States, and the influx of British Loyalists caused further upheaval. Abandoned lots on Oak Island could be had by anyone willing to assume the taxes and clear the ground. The mainland acreage Ball owned was logged-over land, cleared of trees and littered with stumps. The 1793 poll tax records for Oak Island show that its residents were, by any measure, poor. Ball's neighbour Donald McInnis, the Daniel McGinnis of Money Pit fame, owned comparable livestock. Ball was a successful farmer who accumulated property over six decades of hard work. Whether that alone accounts for his holdings is the question that refuses to go away.
Samuel Ball's Property on the Map
The DesBrisay Problem
A curious detail in the historical record deepens the mystery. In the first edition of Judge Mather Byles DesBrisay's History of the County of Lunenburg, published in 1870, the three men credited with discovering the Money Pit are listed as Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Samuel Ball. In the second edition, published in 1896, Ball's name had been replaced by Anthony Vaughan. No explanation for the change was offered. DesBrisay still mentioned Ball in the revised edition, describing him as an early resident of Oak Island, a man who had come from South Carolina where he had been enslaved, and noting only that he was remembered as a good man. The 1791 census shows that Ball and Donald McInnis were neighbours on the island. Ball witnessed McGinnis's will in 1827. Anthony Vaughan served as executor of Ball's own will. These men knew each other well. Whether Ball was present at the discovery or arrived shortly after remains one of Oak Island's unresolved questions.
What the Ground Reveals
The show has explored Ball's former properties extensively. In Season 4, metal detection expert Gary Drayton and Oak Island historian Charles Barkhouse searched Lot 24, recovering a British military officer's dandy button, a coin bearing the name and likeness of King George II dating to the mid-1700s, and a lead ingot of the type used for making musket balls. All three finds are consistent with a British military presence on the island before 1795, but they are equally consistent with the personal effects of Ball himself, a man who had served in the British army for years. In later seasons, Drayton recovered additional artifacts from Ball's former lots, including an old lock with a visible keyhole on Lot 25 and a metal tag that some researchers have speculated was a rifle buttplate inscribed with the words "Samuel Ball, 42nd Grenadiers," though this reading remains unconfirmed.
The Three Chests
The most dramatic claim about Ball comes not from the historical record but from oral tradition. In Season 3, Joyce McGinnis and her sisters visited Oak Island and repeated a story that had been passed down through the McGinnis family for generations. According to the tale, the original discoverers found three chests of treasure at a shallow depth in the Money Pit and took one each. Joyce produced a heavy cross of braided gold, hand-hammered and clearly old, which she said had been examined by jewellers who estimated it could be five hundred years old. She said her grandfather had insisted it be handed down from eldest son to eldest son, and that she had been told to never let it out of her sight. The story first surfaced publicly in 2007, when a local historian named Danny Hennigar spoke to a McGinnis descendant who showed him the cross. If the account is true, Ball may have been the third man, and his sudden ability to purchase land in 1787 takes on a different meaning entirely.
The Boyd Family Silence
A descendant of Ball named Frank Stanley Boyd, eight generations removed, posted biographical notes on a blog dedicated to the elimination of racism in Canada before his death in Halifax in 2010. His son, John-David Boyd, was contacted by journalists and by the producers of the show. In his only substantive communication, Boyd said that his father had summoned him to his bedside near the end of his life to tell him "the rest of the story," and then instructed him not to give it away. Boyd declined all further contact. Whatever the Boyd family knows, or believes they know, they have chosen to keep it to themselves. In Season 5, Anthony and Ivan Boyd, identified as Ball's great-great-grandsons, appeared on camera alongside Charles Barkhouse and Doug Crowell to discuss their ancestor's life and his connection to the island.
A Free Man
Samuel Ball lived on Oak Island for nearly sixty years. He married twice, first to Mary, with whom he had three children (two of whom died young), and later to Catherine, who survived him. He employed a servant named Isaac Butler, a Black man who arrived in Nova Scotia after 1812 and remained with the family until Ball's death. His will stipulated that none shall possess his land unless they take the name Ball. No known photograph or etching of him exists. No gravestone has been found in any Lunenburg County cemetery listing. His mainland property adjoined lands owned by Daniel McGinnis. The foundation of his home on Lot 25 is still there, overgrown but visible, on an island where men have been digging for treasure since before he arrived, or perhaps since shortly after he did.
