Brothers Foundation's first projects was to establish Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie. The hospital opened in 1929 and later affiliated with IU Health. Minnetrista In 1893 Frank C. Ball bought approximately of land along the north bank of the White River, outside Muncie, where the Ball family built their homes. His two sisters named the site Minnetrista, a combination of the Native American word for water, mine or minne, and the Middle English spelling of a word meaning a pre-arranged "gathering place", trist or tryst. Frank Ball's estate home, which was also called Minnetrista was the first to be built on the site in 1894; it burned in 1967. Frank's property became the site for a new a cultural center for the Muncie community. The center, which was named Minnetrista, opened in 1988. It preserves artifacts that document the history of Muncie and east central Indiana, and continues as a gathering place an important part of the Muncie, Indiana, community. Situated on , visitors may still visit its gardens and natural areas, which contain an assorted community of native Indiana plant and animal species, for free. Ball State University Eastern Indiana Normal University, a small, private teacher training school that was a forerunner to Ball State University, opened in 1899 to help boost the development of the city of Muncie Indiana located in Delaware County, Indiana. The school opened to much fanfare after the dedication of the administration building on August 28, 1899. The school would go onto have a great first year with an enrollment of 250 students who were enrolled in one of eight programs offered by the school. Tuition was cheap compared to modern standards with a ten-week session costing students $10. Soon after that first year enrollment dropped to 110 and only 40 new students signed up The Eastern Indiana Normal University would close soon after on September 24, 1901. After the college and subsequent efforts to established an institution of higher learning at Muncie had failed, with the financial help of George A. Ball, a wealthy manufacturer, the assets of the Muncie National Institute, a former normal school that was then training hotel employees, were purchased and donated to the State of Indiana to become a branch of the Indiana State Normal School at Terre Haute known today as Indiana State University. In 1918 the school opened as the Indiana State Normal School, Eastern Division.