Physician Maggie Ballard was born on April 9, 1900, at Greenville in Monroe County, where her father was postmaster and owned a general store.
She attended school in Greenville and at the Alleghany Collegiate Institution in Alderson. After receiving her undergraduate degree from WVU, she became one of the first women to earn a medical degree from the University of Maryland. For the next four decades, she was a physician in Baltimore, specializing in obstetrics and gynecology, and served on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.