In the past, when Supeluse Street was still undeveloped, it was an outlying plot on the edge of the suburbs facing the city pasture. The year of construction and the first owners of the house are unknown. All that is known is that in 1857, the newly widowed Julie Hebenstreit bought a wooden house and everything that came with it from foreman Jakov Poroshov. 

Julie Dorothea Hebenstreit (1818-1902) was born in Kuressaare and married Captain Johann Georg Hebenstreit (1817-1855) in Pärnu. The property remained in the possession of the widow for years. She had the old house – the seaward part of the current building volume – extended in several stages. In 1895, she sold the property to Ernst Breede, a Germanised Latvian who taught at a gymnasium in Pärnu. 

A forgotten figure of the Latvian awakening 

Ernst Friedrich Breede (1852-1937), Ernests Fridrihs Briedis in Latvian, was born the son of a farmer in Popervāle Manor in Courland, educated at the Boys’ Gymnasium in Miitav (Jelgava) and then entered the University of Tartu in 1872 to study classical philology. 

Under the pseudonym Bojenieks, he published mainly linguistic and literary contributions to Latvian newspapers, as well as the collection “Trīs dziedājumi” (“Three Poems”) in Riga in 1871 and the play “Nedz pa labo, nedz pa kreiso” (“Neither to the Right nor to the Left”) in 1875, one of the oldest original Latvian plays. 

After his studies in Tartu, he studied at the St Petersburg Teachers’ Seminary, and in 1884 he came to Pärnu to teach ancient languages. When he settled in Pärnu, he no longer flaunted his Latvian peasant origins, but assimilated into the upper-class German community by marrying Elisabeth, daughter of the mayor Georg Friedrich Rambach. Thereafter, he largely disappeared from the picture and into oblivion in Latvian cultural history. 

As a teacher, Breede was equally appreciated by his students – Edgars Krieviņš, later Latvian ambassador to Estonia, who studied at Pärnu Gymnasium from 1896-1903, recalled Breede as a demanding teacher with broad intellectual interests [Australian Latvian, 10.09.1955]. During the First World War, when Pärnu Gymnasium was evacuated to Russia, Breede became the head of a new school founded by the city. And when in the young Republic of Estonia the local German community, based on the law of cultural autonomy, started to establish a private gymnasium in their own language, Ernst Breede became the first headmaster of this school as well in 1919. 

Breede ended his career as a teacher at the age of 70, still living in the same house on Supeluse Street. His punctuality became legendary in Pärnu, and they used to say holidaymakers set their clocks according to Breede’s daily walks that started from his home on Supeluse Street at exactly 12:00. After a serious illness, Breede died on 19 December 1937 and was buried in Pärnu Alevi Cemetery. The property on Supeluse Street remained in the hands of the Breede heirs until 1940, when the ownerless house was nationalised (Breede’s daughter, Gertrud Koch, had left during the wave of relocations to Germany). 

Housing Authority Club 

After the war, the building was taken over by the Pärnu City Housing Authority. As the old building was very dilapidated by the early 1960s and the apartments were uninhabitable, the housing authority decided to house its trade union club here – a spacious hall was built on the first floor out of two larger rooms, and children’s clubs and folk and ballroom dance groups started to meet here. In addition to the club, a regional law enforcement point was set up in the building, where the local people’s militia, or in today’s sense, volunteer auxiliary police officers, gathered with the purpose of ensuring social order in the district – moving sleeping drunks and taming hooligans. 

After the restoration of independence, the building housed the Pärnu County Home Defence Organisation for some time in the early 1990s. Then the tenants, trying to run restaurants and bars here, started to change. An American-style tavern called Väike Texas (Little Texas) or Texas Honky Tonk, which started in 1998, continued to operate for a longer period of time, with Pärnu Theatre actor and dedicated culinary artist Peeter Kard contributing to the creation of the menu. After the turn of the millennium, Väike Texas moved to Tallinn, where it still operates today.