Philip Palmer, Robert H. Taylor Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts
In 1837, John Pierpont Morgan was born into a wealthy and distinguished family in Hartford, Connecticut. As a young man, he traveled to continue his education in Europe, where he fostered a passion for history, art, and literature before beginning his banking career in New York in 1857.
In 1861, Morgan married Amelia Sturges, known as Memie. She was the daughter of the prominent arts patron Jonathan Sturges. Memie had tuberculosis, a slowly progressing disease that was one of the leading causes of death at the time. She died on their honeymoon four months later. Morgan would marry a second time, to Frances Tracy in 1865. Together they would raise four children: Louisa, Jack, Juliet, and Anne.
Pierpont Morgan worked closely with his father’s London-based bank, importing capital to fund the emerging US economy. He played an important role in the volatile railroad industry in the years after the Civil War. When Morgan’s father, Junius, died in 1890, he turned his attention to industrial corporations which would form the infrastructure that propelled America’s expansion. He organized General Electric, US Steel, International Harvester, and AT&T, the modern form of American Telegraph and Telegram.
On a 1913 trip through Egypt he became unwell and returned to Rome where he died on March 31. His body was returned to New York and laid out in his library. Morgan’s funeral was held on April 14 on 16th Street, near Second Avenue, at St. George’s Church, where he had been a deacon. The procession traveled to Hartford, Connecticut, where Morgan was interred in the family plot at Cedar Hill Cemetery.