Anglican Commemoration
Priest, Missionary, & Educator
April 3 · d. 1876
also known as James Breck, J.L. Breck
James Lloyd Breck (1818-1876) was an Episcopal priest who spent thirty-five years planting the Church on the American frontier. From a Philadelphia boyhood he went west with Bishop Jackson Kemper's blessing, founding Nashotah House in Wisconsin, missions among the Ojibwe at Gull Lake and Leech Lake, schools at Faribault in Minnesota, and colleges at Benicia in California, where he died of exhaustion at fifty-seven.
James Lloyd Breck was twenty years old and had never been anywhere. He had just taken his diploma from the University of Pennsylvania, and he was a little proud of it, and he wrote to the aunt who had paid for his schooling to say so. Then, in the same letter, he told her what he meant to do with it. "Rather than not work in Thy vineyard, let me labor in the meanest corner of it, even among the briars and thorns where no good seed has ever taken root!" He was willing, he wrote, to preach the gospel in the remotest and most heathen portion of earth's wide surface, should the Lord see fit to send him. That was July of 1838. He had not yet gone anywhere at all. Everything that follows is that sentence being kept.
Two years later Bishop Jackson Kemper, whose diocese was the whole American West, came to the General Theological Seminary in New York and spoke to the students. A plan formed among Breck's classmates for a religious house in the Wisconsin woods. Breck was ordained deacon in July of 1841, wrote to his brother the next morning that he was "no longer a layman: a Minister of Christ, a Deacon, an office that can never be laid aside," and at the end of that August left his parents' roof for the last time as a son of the house.
You should understand what he was going to. In the summer of 1842 land was bought at the Nashotah lakes, and on the thirtieth of August Breck and William Adams and a man named Charles Curran moved onto it. Their house was a single frame room, thirteen feet by seventeen, one story high. They cooked their own pork and potatoes and tea over their own fire. "Having neither bedstead nor mattress," Breck wrote home, "we shall sleep on our buffalo robes, spread upon the floor." And then, in the same breath: the place is delightfully retired, and several are the spots adapted for private oratories.
That is the whole of the man in two sentences. They had nothing. They kept the offices anyway: up at five, Matins at six, Morning Prayer at nine, prayers again at three and at half past six. They held their goods in common because that was what the apostles did. They taught theological students without charge and worked four hours a day for their board and washing. And because the house owned exactly one candlestick, the ancient order of acolytes was restored at Nashotah by boys sitting on benches holding the candles in their hands.
That October, Kemper rode a hundred and twenty miles with Breck and Adams, nearly four days on the road, to make them priests among the Oneida at Duck Creek.
Nashotah was the first of three. In 1850 Breck left it, weeping, and went north to Minnesota; on St. John Baptist's day he set his foot on Minnesota soil and reared a rustic cross under a spreading elm, using the same limestone slab for an altar. In 1852 the Ojibwe chief Hole-in-the-Day invited him to Gull Lake, and there, with the Ojibwe catechist Enmegahbowh beside him as co-founder, he laid the cornerstone of St. Columba's on All Saints' Day. In 1857 he began the schools at Faribault, and in 1867 he sailed for California and began again at Benicia. Three times he built something and three times he handed it to someone else and walked on. "Nashotah was my sphere once," he wrote in 1855; "Minnesota was, after it; and the Chippeway field is as much so now."
The cost was not abstract. He had almost vowed himself to celibacy as a boy at Flushing, and watched that vow become unlivable at Nashotah, and married Jane Maria Mills in the church at Gull Lake in 1855, whom the mission children called their white mother. In the depth of the winter of 1861 she fell ill, and he carried her three days by covered sleigh to St. Paul, and she lingered weeks there, and died in the spring. He went back to work. In 1858, out east on a steamboat begging money for missions he could not fund, he wrote that he was unable to abandon the Indian while a lingering hope remained, and that the fault lay with the policy of the government and the unprincipled character of the frontier whites.
He preached his last sermon on the Sunday before Lent in 1876, on the preparation Christ made for his own death, and closed it by saying that if this Lent should be their last upon earth, and they should never see another Good Friday, they would be the better assured that they would see another Easter. Four days later he collapsed while saying Evening Prayer in his school chapel. He died on the thirtieth of March, of exhaustion, at fifty-seven, and they buried him under the chancel at Benicia with two bishops and five clergymen standing by.
Twenty years later one of his sons wrote east to ask what the Church meant to do about his father's grave, saying that if nobody acted, he and his brother would bury him permanently in California. That letter moved the bones. In the last week of October 1896 the son carried the casket the whole long journey from the Pacific coast to Wisconsin and knelt at its foot while fourteen bishops and two hundred clergymen stood in the chapel of the school he had built out of one frame room, and the students of Nashotah House carried their founder the last third of a mile to the grave. Among the pallbearers was a priest who had been one of the five at Benicia. Five, and then two hundred. He had told the Minnesota clergy in his farewell sermon that rest ought not to be expected or sought for on this side of the grave, and that all toil and self-denial and suffering here would be amply repaid by the Rest prepared for the Saints in Glory. He had nine more years of work in him when he said it, and he spent every one of them.
You have probably built something you did not get to keep. Breck built three, and left each of them to another man's hands while it was still young, and did not treat that as failure. What made it bearable was that he had settled, at twenty, what he was for, and the settling held through a wife's death, thirty-five years of begged money, and a body that finally gave out at fifty-seven. He told the Minnesota clergy that rest should not be looked for on this side of the grave, then went to California and worked nine more years to prove he had meant it. Where have you been treating rest as something owed to you now, rather than as the thing prepared and waiting?
The record for Breck is unusually good, and it is nearly all his own. Seven years after his death his elder brother, Charles Breck (1816-1891), compiled The Life of the Reverend James Lloyd Breck, D.D., Chiefly from Letters Written by Himself (New York, 1883), which prints his dated letters from July 1838 through his last, of 23 February 1876, and adds as an appendix the one complete composition he left, a farewell sermon preached to the Convention of the Diocese of Minnesota in June 1867. The same volume carries an eyewitness account of the final illness, a letter written in Easter week 1876 by the Rev. Alfred Stubbs of Benicia. A second life, Theodore I. Holcombe's An Apostle of the Wilderness (New York, 1903), draws largely on the same letters but adds independent material, above all Holcombe's own first-person account of the 1896 removal of the remains to Nashotah. No modern critical edition of either exists, and whether Breck's holograph letters survive as manuscripts anywhere is not established.
Because the letters are dated, several things commonly said about Breck can be corrected from the source. The Associate Mission reached Wisconsin in 1841, and Breck twice dated it so himself; but the Nashotah site was bought and settled in 1842, and the move onto it was 30 August of that year. He was ordained deacon on 11 July 1841, confirmed twice over in his own letters, not on 4 July as some summaries give. He died on 30 March 1876, and was buried on Sunday 2 April; the calendar commemoration falls on the funeral date, which is why April 2 is sometimes misreported as the day of his death. Where the two lives disagree, the family compilation is the closer witness: it names his second wife Sarah E. Styles where Holcombe's spelling has been followed into some reference works as Stiles, and it gives him as the fourth son of fourteen children where Holcombe makes him the fourth child of fifteen. Holcombe also misreads the Benicia funeral church as St. Mary's where three witnesses, including the same contemporary notice he is quoting, read St. Paul's.
Two things about his missionary work are genuinely open and should be said plainly rather than settled. The first is that no Ojibwe-originated account of Breck has been found. The institutional claim that the Ojibwe trusted him rests on a single uncited modern paragraph, and it is told entirely from the missionary's side. What can be set beside it is his own judgment, written on 22 March 1858, that the fault for the mission's difficulties lay with United States policy and with settler conduct rather than with the Ojibwe; the same letters that carry that judgment also carry the vocabulary of his century, "savages" and "barbarous people" and "civilizing," and the two belong in the same view of him. The second is that whether his Ojibwe missions had any residential-boarding character cannot be sourced in either direction. What the record describes is itinerant stations with Breck almost perpetually on the ground, and the Faribault schools, forty miles west of the Mississippi, appear to have served settler families and trained clergy rather than to have been a Native institution at all. The two threads should not be blurred.
The Episcopal Church keeps no canonization process, and there is no shrine, relic devotion, or pilgrimage attached to Breck. What there is, is a commemoration: he was entered into the church's calendar by act of General Convention, carried from Lesser Feasts and Fasts through Holy Women, Holy Men into A Great Cloud of Witnesses, whose text remembers him as priest, missionary, and educator and records that he died of exhaustion at the age of fifty-seven. The collect asks God to teach the Church "to value and support pioneering and courageous missionaries, whom you call, as you called your servant James Lloyd Breck, to preach, and teach, and plant your Church on new frontiers." The same calendar commemorates Enmegahbowh, his partner at Gull Lake and the first Native American priest in the Episcopal Church, in June.
The devotion that grew up around him is institutional rather than popular, and it took the form of buildings. Nashotah House still trains priests; Shattuck-St. Mary's still teaches at Faribault; Breck School in Minnesota was founded ten years after his death and named for him. At Grace Church in Martinez, California, a memorial window was installed in 1882, its centre panel lost when the parish sold that building in 1941 and replaced by a replica around the recovered side panels. And at Nashotah his alumni raised a granite cross over the grave in 1898, cut with his name, "Priest, Pastor, Doctor," the words "Jesu Mercy," and on the base the epithet that has followed him ever since: An Apostle of the Wilderness.
The essential source is Charles Breck, ed., The Life of the Reverend James Lloyd Breck, D.D., Chiefly from Letters Written by Himself (New York: E. & J. B. Young, 1883), from which every quotation above is drawn. The 1838 vocation letter to his aunt and the ordination letters of July 1841 are in chapter I; the buffalo-robes letter and the Nashotah rule in chapter II; the 1850 farewell in chapter III; the "three spheres" letter of 10 June 1855 in chapter VI; the 1858 letter to the Rev. Mr. Wilcoxson on government policy in chapter VIII; and the last letter, the Rev. Alfred Stubbs's eyewitness account of the last sermon and the collapse, and the funeral notice, in chapter IX. The 1867 farewell sermon, with the closing charge on rest, is Appendix A. The full text is freely readable at Project Canterbury (https://anglicanhistory.org/usa/jlbreck/letters/index.html), which also hosts Bishop Whipple's address at the burial of Breck's first wife.
For the removal of the remains to Nashotah in 1896, described by a participant, see Theodore I. Holcombe, An Apostle of the Wilderness: James Lloyd Breck, D.D., His Missions and His Schools (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1903), chapters XXXIII-XXXIV, which also gives the grave inscription (https://archive.org/details/apostleofwildern00holc). The commemoration and the collect quoted above are in A Great Cloud of Witnesses (New York: Church Publishing, 2016), authorized by General Convention Resolution 2015-A056, with identical text in Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2006.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant James Lloyd Breck to preach the Gospel to the people of the American Frontier: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11