Ballou, Adin [key], 1803–90, American Universalist clergyman, b. Cumberland, R.I. He was prominent in the movement that resulted in the Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists (1831–41). In 1841 he organized near Milford, Mass., the Hopedale Community, one of the religious utopian communities of the period. He was its president and edited its periodical, the Practical Christian. The Hopedale Community, whose dissolution as a communal enterprise began c.1857, merged (1868) with the Unitarian Hopedale Parish, of which Ballou was pastor until 1880. His writings include Practical Christian Socialism (1854), Primitive Christianity and Its Corruptions (1870), and History of the Hopedale Community (1897).
See his autobiography, edited by his son-in-law, W. S. Heywood (1896).
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