John Jacob Astor

The butcher's son from Walldorf walked 30 miles to Speyer to work his passage down the Rhine, because his father wanted him in the shop and he wanted out. London gave him English, an anglicised name and a trade in flutes. He sailed for the United States in November 1783 and reached Baltimore the following spring with a few of his brother's instruments and almost no money, delivering bread for a German baker to cover his keep. A fur trader named Robert Bowne hired him and taught him to buy, dress and sell peltries. In 1785 he married Sarah Todd, whose dowry was 300 dollars and whose business judgement he rated above that of most merchants. He became an American citizen in 1789. Everything he built, he built here.

He assembled the first great American fortune, and he did it before anyone else. The American Fur Company, founded April 6, 1808 with Jefferson's blessing, broke or bought its rivals until it held the trade from the Great Lakes to the Rockies. It ran on pelts bought from Native nations whose land the same expansion was taking, and on liquor his traders carried into Indian country against federal law. His ships also carried opium to Canton, 10 tons of it in 1816 alone. No American statute forbade that. Chinese law did. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Morgan all come after him.

Fur was a wasting asset and he saw it going. He had begun buying New York land in 1799, took large parcels off the disgraced Aaron Burr in 1803 and 1804, and picked up a 70-acre farm running from Broadway to the Hudson between 42nd and 46th streets while that was open country. When he left the fur business in the 1830s, and sources put the exit at either 1830 or 1834, he moved the money into ground the city had not reached yet. He rarely built on it. He leased it, let the tenants build, and collected. The rents compounded for decades while New York grew north into them. James Parton's 1865 biography has him saying that if he could begin again he would buy every foot of Manhattan. Nobody recorded the line while he was alive.

He died on March 29, 1848, the wealthiest man in the country, leaving an estate put at 20 to 30 million dollars and 400,000 of it for a free library. The Astor Library opened in 1854 and merged in 1895 with the Lenox Library and the Tilden Trust into the New York Public Library. His son William took the rest and enlarged it, and the family became an American aristocracy. He was widely disliked. James Gordon Bennett's Herald argued that half the fortune belonged to New York, because the land had risen on the industry of the city's people, not on anything Astor did. Herman Melville used him in Bartleby, the Scrivener as the emblem of old New York money.

John Jacob Astor's life against the full span of the corpus.

• American Fur Company company
  Chartered April 6, 1808. Held a near monopoly of the United States fur trade by 1830 1808
• Pacific Fur Company company
  The subsidiary meant to carry the trade to the Columbia River and on to Canton 1810
• Fort Astoria building
  The first United States settlement on the Pacific coast. Sold to the British in 1813 1811
• Astor House building
  Broadway at Vesey Street, by Isaiah Rogers. The best known hotel in America for a generation 1836
• Astor Library other
  Endowed with 400,000 dollars in his will. Opened 1854, a founding component of the New York Public Library 1848
• Astorhaus, Walldorf building
  A poorhouse and orphanage for his birthplace, funded with a 50,000 dollar bequest 1854

• November 1783 aged 20 Sails for the United States two months after the war ends He reached Baltimore in the spring of 1784 and went on to New York to join his brother Henry.
• September 19, 1785 aged 22 Marries Sarah Cox Todd, who brings a dowry of 300 dollars She ran the business in New York whenever he was away, and he said her judgement beat most merchants.
• May 18, 1789 aged 25 Buys his first piece of New York ground, at Bowery Lane and Elizabeth Street The same year he became an American citizen.
• April 6, 1808 aged 44 Founds the American Fur Company Thomas Jefferson had approved the plan after a correspondence begun that February.
• April 1811 aged 47 His men establish Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia The first United States community on the Pacific coast.
• October 23, 1813 aged 50 Astoria is sold to the British and the Union Jack goes up The same year he joined Stephen Girard and David Parish in underwriting the 16 million dollar war loan that kept the government solvent.
• 1816 aged ~53 Ships 10 tons of Ottoman opium to Canton aboard the packet Macedonian He later withdrew from the China opium trade and sold into Britain instead.
• 1834 aged ~71 Sells out of the fur trade and puts everything into Manhattan land Accounts differ on the date of his exit, with some placing it in 1830.
• March 29, 1848 aged 84 Dies in New York City, the richest man in America His will left 400,000 dollars for a free public library.

• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. lobbied
• Washington Irving 1783–1859
  Early American storyteller whose Sketch Book gave the country Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow. commissioned
• Meriwether Lewis 1774–1809
  Co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which mapped the American West to the Pacific Ocean. followed the route of
• Cornelius Vanderbilt 1794–1877
  Shipping and railroad magnate whose empire made him one of the wealthiest Americans in history. preceded
• John D. Rockefeller 1839–1937
  Established the Rockefeller Foundation and funded medical research, education, and public health initiatives. preceded
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. preceded