Membership Application
The dearth of information on Victor Pepin, the second great circus proprietor in America - John Bill Ricketts being the first - has finally come to an end with the publication of a genealogy of the Pepin family. Prior to this research almost nothing was known about the man.
T. Allston Brown in his serialized history of the circus in the New York Clipper said Pepin was born in Albany, and taken to France as a child, and returned to America as a circus proprietor in 1806 (it was actually 1807). George Stone wrote that Pepin was born at the corner of North Market Street and the Colonie in Albany, and went to France at age two (in reality, he was thirteen). Greenwood said that Pepin was descended from a French neutral of Acadia and was bom in Philadelphia.
Delane C. Ferguson of Coppell. Texas, has just published Victor Pepin, Circus Career, Descendants and Ancestors. 1760-1900, in which she gives us the first documented account of Pepin's family. Mrs. Ferguson is Pepin's great-great-granddaughter.
Pepin's father, Andre Pepin, was born in France about 1735, and migrated to Canada at the age of twenty-five or thirty. He married Judith Dauni in 1760 in Boucherville, Quebec, across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. Far from being a neutral in the American Revolution, as Greenwood wrote, Andre Pepin, a captain in the Canadian militia, joined the American forces that invaded Quebec in November 1775. Once having committed himself to the American cause, he had no choice but to emigrate. He moved his wife and children to New York State. He served in the army until 1779.
It was in Albany that his fourth child and first son was born. This was Victor Adolphus Pepin and the date March 8, 1780.
The family moved to the west shore of Lake Champlain in 1786, where land was set aside by the state to be given to Canadian and Nova Scotian refugees who had served in the Continental Army.
Andre Pepin went to France in 1793, according to one source, and never returned, thus effectively abandoning his family which at the time consisted of his wife and four children. However, he took his son Victor with him, and that is where we lose our man until 1807.
As is known, Pepin and his partner, Jean Breschard, brought their circus troupe from Spain to Boston in 1807. They toured in this country until September 1814, when the partnership was dissolved, and Pepin's career from then until 1827 is rather well documented. What follows here are facts about Pepin's personal life as unearthed by Mrs. Ferguson.
Pepin married in 1809. His bride was Martha Townes of Philadelphia. They eventually had six children, four of whom survived childhood. Of these, only one became a performer, the eldest, Narcissa Carolina (1811-1865). She may have appeared with her father as early as 1822, although 1826 seems more likely. She married a fellow performer, Robert Weir.
In June, 1826, Martha Pepin filed for divorce in Louisville, traveling from Philadelphia to do so. The case was heard in February 1827. Henry Westbay, a ticket seller in 1824, testified for Mrs. Pepin, saying that her husband did not supply her with enough to live on, and was living in “an adulterous state with a lady employed as a circus rider.” This may have referred to Miss Payne (we find no other women with the company), who married Peter Coty, another performer, in 1826. Martha Pepin was granted a divorce in February 1827, and married Henry Westbay that April. They were together thirty-six years, had one son, and are buried in Louisville.
Narcissa Pepin also had marriage problems. She filed for divorce from Robert Weir in 1829, claiming that he abandoned her in Nashville. Weir, who had been tried for murder in St. Louis while with the Pepin Circus, was apparently given to favor the bottle. Henry Westbay, by then her step-father, appeared as a witness on her behalf. Granted the divorce, Narcissa married again in 1831. She had eleven children by her second husband, William Wilson, a carpenter in Louisville. Narcissa is the only one of the persons mentioned here of whom a photograph exists; even that was taken when she was fifty.
As for Victor Pepin, the man who took the circus into the West, he appeared briefly as a riding instructor in Baltimore in 1831, and was tendered a benefit in Louisville by Fogg & Stickney in l837. He died in 1845, and is buried in Fairview Cemetery, New Albany, Indiana. His grave is not marked, but he has a more enduring monument to his credit, the Walnut Street Theatre, which he built in 1809, still stands in Philadelphia.
Our thanks go to Delane Ferguson for allowing us to use her research material for this article.
CHS webmaster J. Griffin, last modified December 2005.