More about M.M. White's best friend and business partner, John L Wirt - the story of his wounding is also told in the book The Field of Blood by Joanne B. Freeman
This is from the article Lost Capitol Hill: John L. Wirt it describes what happened to John L. Wirt as he was trying to break up a fight on the House floor.
This is another step in the MM White timeline
:tussle between Representatives Rathbun and White on the House floor." While Rathbun and White were going at it, one William S. Moore was trying to get onto the floor of the House. Moore, originally from Kentucky, was in Washington attempting to get some satisfaction from an unknown government agency. Presumably, he hoped to pester one of the Representatives for assistance in this matter. Not being a member of the House, the Sergeant-at-Arms attempted to keep him from the floor. Representative William C. McCauslen of Ohio came to the Sergeant-at-Arms’s assistance, and escorted Moore out, then turned to return to the floor. At that moment, Moore pulled out a pistol and fired. Who he was aiming for was undetermined, but the fact was that the bullet went home–not to McCauslen, but to one John L. Wirt of the Capitol Police. Wirt was just exiting the floor when he was struck in the thigh. Moore was tackled and dragged off to the post office of the House, where he was relieved of both the gun and a dirk he was carrying and placed under arrest.....
Wirt, for his part, did quite well for himself. A few years later, he was elected Alderman, and served as such for four years. He also assisted his neighbor Mathias M. White , a funeral director.
White noted in an ad that ran in the Daily Union of May 1, 1850 that “John L. Wirt will see to the filling of all orders during my absence with the remains of Hon. John C. Calhoun.” Calhoun (pic) had died on March 31st of that year, and was taken back to Charleston, SC, for burial. Wirt was also assaulted two more times in the following years, but it was the injury caused by Moore that caused him the greatest problems.
In 1854, one of his colleagues, Aquilla K. Arnold, wrote a letter to Congress in which he testified that Wirt’s health was “feeble” and that walking up hills was so difficult that “the police and watch in the Capitol grounds … close the gates assigned to him as his duty … which I believe he would do if he had to crawl to do it.” Two years later, he reiterated his belief. The following year, on November 20, 1857, Wirt died of ‘hemorrhage of the lungs” He was not yet 50 years old.
Wirt was buried in Congressional Cemetery, where he was joined less than two years later by his widow, Margaret Rebecca Wirt, nee Duley. She, too, was young, having just passed her 45th birthday. Here is the report from House of Representative during the 34th Congress.
Wirt John Shooting House Report 34th Congress by Nancy on Scribd
A policeman and civil servant, in 1849 John L. Wirt was a member of the Capitol Police. He went on to be elected a city Alderman, in which office he served four years. He was also an assistant funeral director, working with and for Mathias M. White, who sold the Fisk coffins (in one of which DPM was buried). Wirt died in 1857, not yet 50 years old, from a “hemorrhage of the lungs,” and was buried in Congressional Cemetery. In 1837 he married Margaret Rebecca Duley Wirt, who lived only two years more than her husband.
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An entrepreneur and inventor, Almond D. Fisk was the son of Catherine Worthington and Solomon Fisk. In 1848, Fisk patented an improvement in the manufacture of coffins. “What I claim therein as new,” Fisk wrote in his patent, “is the manufacturing of coffins of cast or raised metal when made... to the human form.” Molded in two equal parts, the cases “united horizontally.” From these coffins, “the air may be exhausted so completely as entirely to prevent the decay of the contained body on principles well understood.” Thus the body was sealed in a sarcophagus that would preserve the deceased’s remains and prevent the spread of disease and, theoretically, putrefaction.
Due to high demand, Fisk partnered with his brother-in-law, William Raymond, and opened a foundry in New York to manufacture the coffins shortly after receiving his patent. John Payne Todd apparently viewed one of his coffins on display in Washington City in the spring of 1849. A few weeks later, Fisk wrote DPM about the possibility of reinterring JM in one of his coffins. It is unknown what DPM thought of that idea, but when she died that summer, she was interred in one of Fisk’s new coffins.
In 1840 Fisk married Phoebe Ann Raymond, with whom he had five children. In the fall of 1849 Fisk’s foundry was leveled by fire. Shortly thereafter, Fisk fell ill and died in the fall of 1850.
First quotation is from Fisk, Almond D., inventor; “Improvement in Coffins” U.S. Patent 5,920. November 14, 1848; second quotation, Daily National Intelligencer, 18 October 1850.
