Spouse: Marie Louise Parsons (1857–1948). Children: William Lawrence Breese II (1882–1915). Kinship: Fifth cousin four times removed of the post–World War II Smith generation.

Career and Family Connections

William Lawrence Breese I was part of the distinguished Breese–Lawrence lineage, descended through his grandmother, Catharine Livingston, from the prominent Livingston family of colonial and early national New York. Alongside his elder brother, James Lawrence Breese (1851–1934), he co-founded the New York stockbroking firm Breese & Smith, which prospered during the Gilded Age.

Like his brother, William moved in elite circles of New York society, where art, finance, and scandal frequently mingled. Both attended the notorious “Pie Girl Dinner” hosted by architect Stanford White, one of the most infamous society scandals of the 1890s (see entry for James Lawrence Breese).

He married Marie Louise Parsons (1857–1948), with whom he had one son, William Lawrence Breese II (1882–1915).

In the early 1880s he established a country place on Long Island. In 1883 he acquired the 290-acre Timber Point Farm on the west side of the Connetquot River at Great River, near Islip, a tract long associated with the Nicoll family. He developed Timber Point as a working estate and sporting retreat, part of the South Shore's emerging colony of country places. The property later became the nucleus of the Timber Point Country Club and, in time, county parkland, but it was Breese who first gave the site its name and early character as a gentleman's farm and riverside seat.

William died prematurely in 1888 at the age of thirty-five, leaving his wife a young widow. She later remarried Henry Vincent Higgins, the English impresario of Covent Garden, and moved with her son to England, where the younger William was educated.