Rev. J.T. Breese relocated to the Land of the Free

The following is a re-print of a past column by former Advertiser columnist Stephen Thorning, who passed away on Feb. 23, 2015.

Some text has been updated to reflect changes since the original publication and any images used may not be the same as those that accompanied the original publication.

Last week’s column began the saga of J.T. Breese, the Congregational minister of Alton, whose 1880 fundraising lecture tour to Fergus and Elora was not, as he asserted, for the Alton church building fund and various charities. 

Every penny, it appeared, went into his own pocket.

The lengthy letter that J.T. Breese sent to the Fergus News Record for the March 4, 1880 issue was his last bombardment of his growing list of enemies, of whom Rev. Duff of the Fergus Congregational Church was the most vocal. The outlook for the minister grew gloomier by the hour. 

Duff, and several other Fergus and Elora ministers, made various enquiries, and they were reasonably certain that Breese was not an ordained minister in any recognized Christian church. New stories of his various scams and schemes surfaced daily. 

Emboldened by his sinking reputation, several more women came forward with tales of propositions and advances he had made to them. And his own church in Alton decided that they would sever their connection with him as of June 1. 

Breese had beaten one charge of fraud, but he realized more were in preparation. Clearly, there was little more he could harvest in the Wellington County vineyard or its vicinity. Before the ink was dry on the March 4 Fergus paper, J.T. Breese was on a train, headed west, with a Gladstone bag containing his ill-gotten gains. He surfaced on the morning of March 6 in London.

There, he presented himself to a Mrs. Portwood, who ran one of the better boarding houses in the city. Putting on his best ministerial demeanour, he explained that he was a Congregational minister, and that he was in the city for a few weeks to sell 1,000 copies of an inspirational book. His manner initially fooled her and the other boarders. During his first day there he talked about various religious topics. Even for a minister, he seemed a man of rare piety.

The next morning he told Mrs. Portwood that he had a daughter, and asked her permission to bring her to the house. She assented, and he later told his landlady that he had telegraphed for the daughter to join him.

One evening at dinner, Breese shed his pose. Learning that Mrs. Portwood’s husband was away on a business trip, he suddenly took an interest in her, praising her beauty and making other remarks quite out of place for a man of the cloth. She was appalled, and told him, in front of the other boarders, that his conduct was coarse and inappropriate.

Undeterred, the next day he wrote a poem to her, which he sang at dinner. Unsuccessful in those advances, the next day he approached a 16-year-old servant girl in the kitchen, trying to convince her to go away with him and live as his wife. The girl resisted his advances, and immediately reported them to Mrs. Portwood. She banned him from the kitchen. At dinner that night he attempted to deny his lewd conduct to the other boarders, but the servant girl made them known again at the table.

The next morning J.T. Breese left the boarding house early, with his bag, supposedly containing books. In the post later that day Mrs. Portwood received a card from him with the message “Gone to the Bishop’s; will be back in a day or two and continue with you.” She never heard another word, and had no forwarding address to send his bill for the week’s board and lodging.

Breese’s London escapade was picked up by the papers in the Forest City. The largest of them, the Free Press, circulated all the way to Wellington County, and several papers at home reprinted the story. Most people in Fergus and Elora agreed that it was a brief but appropriate sequel to his longer adventure on their own turf. 

By now J.T. Breese had become something of a celebrity. Papers in Toronto and points east published accounts of his career. To the editor of the Millbrook Messenger, published in Durham County, there was something familiar about J.T. Breese. After a while the recollection became clearer to him.

About 1869 or 1870, a young man named J.T. Breese worked as a hired hand on a farm near that town. He claimed to have religious visions, and was anxious to relate them to anyone who would listen. After a while he decided that it was his mission to spread those revelations to the multitudes. Every couple of months he appeared at the newspaper office with a tract to be printed. He ordered them in quantities of several thousand.

At that point in his career, Breese had not yet developed his fine style of speaking and writing. The tracts contained “such blasphemous language as to convince anyone of common sense that the author was either a lunatic or a fool,” recalled the editor. 

That recollection served as a delightful prologue to the tale of Rev. J.T. Breese. At that point, Wellington County lost track of Breese, and his brief but unforgettable time in the area faded into folklore.

But that was not the end of the career of Rev. J.T. Breese. His stay in London was merely a stopover on his journey to the United States. He surfaced again late in 1880 in Kansas City. There he resumed his pose as a Congregational minister, and soon attached himself to Kawsmouth Chapel, which the local Congregationalists had recently constructed at a cost of $4,000.

After his experience with the Alton Church, Breese considered himself something of an expert in raising funds for a building fund. But he had learned much in his Wellington County adventures. This time he was less greedy and more subtle.

J.T. Breese showed himself to be a master at Yankee drive and initiative. Kansas City was then a boom town, with thousands of men floating through town seeking work on railway and other construction projects. Many lived in flop houses and sub-standard quarters. 

Breese set up the basement of the church as a restaurant, and served meals to these workers for $3.25 per week. The chapel contained a little-used second floor. This he converted into lodgings, rented out by the week.

Profits from those two ventures supported the church and slowly liquidated the building debt. Breese personally supervised the financial operations of the church. Soon he set up a lending library in the main part of the church. That space was seldom used except by the church other than for Sunday services. 

And even Sunday provided opportunities: he rented the church to the Swedish Lutherans in Kansas City for their church services, early on Sunday morning before his own Congregational service. It is tempting to think that J.T. Breese found a comfortable niche in the bustling confusion of boomtown Kansas City in the 1880s. Alas, he does not seem to have remained there long.

The latest mention I found of Rev. Breese is a Kansas City newspaper account from September 1882, describing the splendid work he was doing for his church and the large sums he was raising through the various business ventures associated with the building.

And what happened to him after 1882? I don’t know. Perhaps he drifted off to till fresh fields. He may well have changed his name. He had already discovered that his reputation and past history could soon catch up to him through the circulation of newspapers. I like to think that he carried on for a few more years, further enlivening the American west during its boom years of the 1880s and 1890s, just as he had enlivened Wellington County during his brief passage through our midst.

*This column was originally published in the Advertiser on June 17, 2005.