Dr. James Wright Markoe

1862 - 1920  (57 years)

• Name	James Wright Markoe  [1]
  Prefix	Dr.
  Birth	19 Jul 1862	New York, New York
  Gender	Male
  Death	18 Apr 1920	New York, New York
  Burial	Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, Westchester, New York
  Person ID	I16078	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
  Last Modified	22 Nov 2020

  
  

  Family	Annette Wetmore,   b. Feb 1862, New York, New York d. 5 Feb 1962 (Age ~ 99 years)
  Marriage	22 Nov 1894  [1]
  Family ID	F10058	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	10 Oct 2017

  
  

• Notes

  He was a close friend and counselor to J. Pierpont Morgan, and he died "taking a bullet" for him, albeit seven years after the financier's death. In early 1920, an escaped mental patient named Thomas W. Simpkin travelled from his native London to New York to, by his own account, kill J. Pierpont Morgan Sr., evidently unaware that the senior Morgan had died in 1913. On April 13, 1920, Simpkin walked into St. George's Church on Stuyvesant Square in New York, aware that it was the Morgan family church, just as Dr. James Markoe was passing the collection plate. Believing Markoe to be the senior Morgan, Simpkin pulled out a pistol and shot him in the forehead at close range. Markoe was rushed to the nearby Lying-In Hospital, an institution he had convinced Morgan to endow, where he died a few minutes later. (All of this detail comes from The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow, the author of the Alexander Hamilton biography that inspired the musical.)

  
  

• Sources

  [S1692] "vanboerum2", 14 Aug 2008, post to WETMORE-L.