Leon Belmont (1853- ?)

Raised as a girl in Warren, Massachusetts, east of Springfield, Addie Walker, the child of a shoemaker, became Mrs Leon Stanley.  

In 1876 Walker/Stanley was indicted in Springfield, Massachusetts for obtaining money under false pretenses, and was jailed for nine months. 

Walker took the name Leon Belmont  around 1878, and moved to Kansas, and then the Dakota territory. There Leon met Clarinda Watts and her daughter, Grace. He courted Grace, went on carriage rides with her, and they became engaged.  He returned with Clarinda and Grace to their home in Minneapolis, which Clarinda ran as a boarding house. Leon was allowed to live there rent free, and started studies with a local doctor. 

However he transfered his attentions to another tenant, Grace’s friend, Sarah Bracket.  He was still allowed to stay rent free, and Sarah loaned $50 to Leon. When he did not repay it, she, in late October 1880, went to the police claiming that he had obtained the money under false pretenses – that is by pretending to be a man.  As Minneapolis had passed a city ordinance against transvesting in 1877, the police chief quickly arrested Belmont and arranged for Dr Putman to examine him.  The doctor reported that Belmont was ‘entirely feminine”.  

In court, Belmont ‘confessed’ to being a woman, and was ordered to pay $50 or serve 60 days in jail.  He declined to pay.  However he was not taken to the jail, but was to serve the time in the home of one of the sheriffs – an unusual arrangement.  

Belmont became a local celebrity.  Photographs of Belmont in a photography gallery, and in the windows of a bookstore attracted crowds of people. A fundraiser to pay his fine was started.  Belmont avoided speaking to the press but did receive supporters in the sheriff’s parlor.  At first the local press was positive, but as no further information was forthcoming, in the second week Belmont was denounced – not as a gender deviant but as a liar who had misled the community that welcomed him.  

11 November Belmont was recalled to court and paid the $50 fine.  It was expected that he would then face re-arrest for obtaining money from Sarah Brackett, but her attorney withdrew the charge, and Belmont was free.   

Then rumors started that he was actually a man. A reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune attributed this idea to 61-year-old Charlotte O. Van Cleve, who worked on behalf of ‘fallen women’ and was famous as the first white woman to be born west of the Mississippi.  Van Cleve had visited Belmont and was said to have verified  his masculinity.  However she immediately sent a letter to the editor saying that she 

“supposed, with others, that [Belmont] is a woman in man’s attire, and [had] consulted with her and others with regard to the preparation of clothing suitable to her sex”.   

A few days later, the St Paul Pioneer Press published an interview with Dr Albert Alonzo Ames, a former mayor of Minneapolis.  Ames maintained that Belmont was a man who had pretended to be a woman to escape from matrimonial promises to Grace and Sarah.  This was complicated when the Minneapolis Tribune discovered an affectionate letter to Belmont from a James Taylor who had lived with Belmont in the Dakota territory.  Two men loving each other was inconceivable.   

Dr Putman, whose original examination was being questioned, confronted Belmont and demanded that he admit that he was a woman.  Belmont refused but agreed to a second examination – for which he never showed up.  By this time Van Cleve had changed her mind, and wrote a second letter to the Tribune: 

“Leon A. Belmont is unequivocally masculine, and hence entitled to wear the garments he now wears”. 

By mid November the Leon Belmont story was running nationwide, including on the front page of the Boston Globe, and papers in Connecticut – where a reader recognized Addie Walker and wrote to a friend in Minneapolis who passed the information on to the Tribune.  The Boston Globe confirmed the indictment in Springfield, and other early details. 

Belmont largely ignored the kerfuffle and in midwinter met one Melvina Campbell.  Campbell divorced her husband and moved in with Belmont.  In April 1881 they moved to the hamlet of Spencer Brook, 40 miles north of Minneapolis, were people did not read the Minneapolis/St Paul newspapers.  They were married by a Justice of the Peace with Campbell’s brother and sister-in-law as witnesses. 

Later they moved back to Minneapolis where Belmont ran for the office of city physician – but without success.  In 1884 they moved away from Minnesota.

• Lizzie Ehrenhalt. “ ‘Curious and Romantic Sensation‘: Sex, Fraud, and Celebrity in the Leon A. Belmont Case of 1880. Minnesota History, 67, 5, Spring 2021.
• Lizzie Ehrenhalt. “The Story of Leon Belmont”.  Minnesota Now, Jun 26, 2023.  Online.

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$50 in 1880 is just over $1,500 today.   Average wages in the US in 1880 were 12-16 ¢ per hour. So $6 for a 40 hour week, or $9 for a 60 hour week.   $50 was a considerable sum.