James Vanderburgh Parker was an American heir and social leader who was prominent in New York society during the Gilded Age.
Early life
Parker was born on December 15, 1830 in Troy, New York and grew up "in the old Parker home at the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street" near Stuyvesant Square. He was the third child born to Charles Maverick Parker and Cornelia Parker, who married in Troy, New York in 1826. Of the four children, he was the only to live to maturity. His paternal grandparents were John Parker and Elizabeth Parker of the "noted old Parker family of Boston" and his maternal grandparents were James Vanderburgh, the Town Clerk of Schodack and brother of Henry Vanderburgh, and Martha Vanderburgh of the old "Knickerbocker Dutch" Vanderburgh family of Albany.
Parker, a "fashionable bachelor of Mrs. Astor's entourage", who never married, inherited a large share of the fortune which has enabled him to be a lifelong man of leisure. In 1892, Parker was included in Ward McAllister's "Four Hundred", purported to be an index of New York's best families, published in The New York Times. Conveniently, 400 was the number of people that could fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom. Parker was noted as a "wit and a linguist" with a striking personal appearance due to his tall, military bearing and white hair. "He spoke French like a native and had the manners of a king." He owned a cottage in Newport, Rhode Island, known as "Sans Souci" and located on Merton Road where he was generally one of the first summer residents to open his cottage and one of the last to leave. In 1897, he publicly challenged the Newport Assessors to "come into court and show before a Judge that their valuation is fair and reasonable" as he felt the tax assessment was overvalued. In Newport, he was a member of the Newport Reading Room, where he socialized with August Belmont, C.C. Baldwin, and General Prescott Lawrence. At the time of his death, he was considered one of Newport's oldest summer residents. Parker died at his home, 253 Madison Avenue in New York City, on January 11, 1917 at the age of 86, leaving an estate worth $2,000,000. In his will, he left his Newport estate to Mrs. Evelyn Kimball Richmond, the wife of Harold A. Richmond of Provincetown, Massachusetts. His relatives contested the validity of the will as he later tore out the page of the will where he left the Newport home to Mrs. Richmond. After his death, Ogden Codman, the Boston architect and interior decorator, leased Sans Souchi for the summer.
