This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ashbel Green Simonton was twenty six years old when he stepped off the ship in Brazil on August 12, 1859, an American missionary arriving to plant a tradition that had no presence in the country before him. He spent his first years there in the patient work of a mission with no converts yet to show for it.
That work bore its first fruit in January 1862, when Simonton's earliest converts made their profession of faith, the first Brazilians to formally join the Presbyterian tradition he had carried across the Atlantic. A year later, in January 1863, that small group of believers became something more permanent still.
The Presbyterian Church of Rio de Janeiro was formally organized that January, the first congregation of what would grow into the Presbyterian Church of Brazil. A single missionary's arrival four years earlier had become an organized, self standing congregation with its own name and its own place in Brazilian religious life.
What Simonton's mission changed for Presbyterianism's spread was the tradition's very first foothold in Brazil. Before 1859 no Presbyterian congregation existed anywhere in the country; by January 1863 one did, and it was that congregation, not any later arrival, that the whole subsequent history of Brazilian Presbyterianism traces back to.