Balls was once a sugar plantation of about four hundred acres. The name comes from a Barbadian planter family named Ball. In 1733 Frances Ball, daughter of the Hon. Guy Ball, married Edwin Lascelles, who was collecter of Customs in Barbados. Their son, Edward, became the First Earl of Harewood and their descendants are now cousins of the Royal Family, as the sixth Earl of Harewood married the Princess Royal, daughter of King George V. Another descendant was the late William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury.
In the early 19th Century, Balls was owned by the Hon. Renn Hampden. His son, Renn Dixon Hampden, born in Barbados in 1793, was educated in England where his appointment as Professor of Theology at Oxford gave rise to a once famous controversy on account of his supposedly nonorthodox views. Nevertheless he became Bishop of Herefore – 1848 – 1868, sharing some of his time in the House of Lords with anouther Barbadian, Samuel Hinds, Bishom of Norwich.
Like nearly all Barbadian plantations, Balls used to grind its cane by means of windmills. The Old Mill dated 1866 is still there and the windmill was still working in the early years of the 1900’s although the Plantation changed over to a steam factory in 1921. The Barbados Horticultural Society bought the old
Boiling House in 1976.