Published by the Buggy Whip Press in 1983, the book Madam Belle Brezing was written by Buddy Thompson. Out of publication, it can be a difficult book to run across. So I was delighted when I found a copy at the Friends of the Library bookseller housed in the basement of the Lexington Public Library’s Central Branch. The book was the product of years of work by Thompson who built his research on that of Joe Jordan and Skeets Meadows.
In her 2014 book Madam Belle: Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel, Maryjean Wall credits Thompson, Jordan, and Skeets as being the source of much of the information about Belle. The research of these three individuals is now housed in UK’s Special Collections. According to the foreword of Thompson’s book, Jordan and Meadows had gone through “trash heaps in the backyard” of Belle’s home on Megowan Street after her death in 1940. Workers had discarded photographs, journals, ledgers, and other documents and artifacts as they prepared for auction. Together, they salvaged much of this important chapter of Lexington history.
For the uninitiated, Belle Brezing was Lexington’s most (in)famous madam. Born in 1860, Belle lived a difficult early life before being taken in by Jennie Hill. Hill operated what was then the finest “house” in town. Thompson wrote that Belle raised prostitution “to an art form.” In 1881, Brezing opened her first brothel and is well-known in Lexington history as having run the “most orderly of disorderly houses.”
I look forward to reading Thompson’s history. If you’re interested in picking up a copy, there were actually two at the Friends bookseller. It’s a bookseller worth supporting as it “provides financial, advocacy and volunteer support to the Library, and functions consistently with the goals and objectives of the Lexington Public Library and its Board of Trustees.”