24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Blue Ball, PA

Blue Ball is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in East Earl Township, Lancaster County, sitting at the crossroads of U.S. Route 322 and Pennsylvania Route 23 about two miles east of New Holland.

Blue Ball takes its unusual name from an inn: in the early 1700s John Wallace built a small inn at the crossing of two Native American trails — the French Creek Path and the Paxtang Path — in the settlement of Earl Town, and instead of a written sign he hung a blue ball out front and called it The Sign of the Blue Ball.

The village liked the name so much that in 1833 Earl Town officially renamed itself Blue Ball after the inn.

The Blue Ball inn became the headquarters of a huge cattle-droving trade that supplied pioneers heading west, an era that lasted until well after the Civil War and ended only when a fire in the early 1900s wiped out the cattle yards.

The original Blue Ball inn was torn down in 1997, but the blue ball that hung outside it is preserved today at the New Holland Area Historical Society Museum.

Blue Ball had 1,031 residents at the 2010 census and about 1,084 at the 2020 census, living in roughly 490 households — solid growth for a rural Pennsylvania Dutch Country village.

Blue Ball is one of Lancaster County's famously quirky place names, a local tradition it shares with neighboring Bird-in-Hand, which was also named after an inn sign.