I think the alternative to ivory at the time was wood. "Mud" balls or "clay" balls I think were mostly Bakelite with minerals added, like this:
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I lived in an antebellum home in about 60-62. No sign of a pool table but a handful of clay balls out in the grassless part of the yard. These were solid color, Apparently baked clay all the way through. I don't remember details well at the moment. Big chunks knocked out of them. This home was haunted and families moved through it rapidly so impossible to say what era or family the balls dated from. There was a huge loft/second floor but most of the floorboards weren't nailed down and exploration was risky to say the least! A huge patch in the ceiling where someone had broken through the ten or twelve foot ceiling and broken a hind leg.
I remember trying to find all of the balls but found less than a half dozen. I suspect earlier children had found a set and took them to play with. No sticks or table pieces ever turned up that I recall. The home burned later, I think the seventies.
The haunted house was an upgrade, I had lived in a slave cabin on our farm after our farmhouse burned! I was surprised to see the slave cabin had been drug out to the highway intersection and was being used as a little novelty shop not too long ago. I would have visited but it was closed when I went by.
Wouldn't swear to it but I have always thought that one phase of balls were ivory cue balls or billiard sets and clay balls. I noticed that they were killing 12,000 elephants a year for billiard balls when the search was launched for a substitute. Celluloid was the first substitute, I think it claimed a $10,000 prize. Minor detail, those balls literally exploded when hit too hard. I thought phenolic wasn't too far behind.
There were sets of mixed ivory and clay at one point, I think while the search for a plastic was on. I can't remember full sized wooden balls, some miniature toy balls that I ran across were wood.
All I know about the old balls and then some!
Hu
