Astor quit fur for Manhattan dirt and never looked back
Germany's youngest son of a butcher became America's first multi-millionaire by monopolizing beaver pelts, then pivoted before European hat fashions changed. He leased Manhattan land rather than building on it, betting New York City would grow northward.
Johann Jakob Astor was born in 1763 in Walldorf, Germany, worked in his uncle's London piano factory, and reached Baltimore in 1784 after the American Revolution. A fur trader on his voyage inspired him to buy hides from Native Americans, prepare them, and resell at great profit. Within two decades his fortune exceeded $250,000.
Astor exploited the 1794 Jay Treaty to trade with Montreal rivals of the Hudson's Bay Company. Following the Empress of China, he traded opium, furs, tea, and sandalwood at Canton. The 1807 Embargo Act disrupted imports, so with Jefferson's permission he founded the American Fur Company in 1808, later creating Pacific and Southwest subsidiaries. Fort Astoria on the Columbia River became the first US settlement on the Pacific coast in 1811.
War and shifting European hat fashions eventually pushed Astor out of fur by 1830. He had already been buying Manhattan land since 1799, purchasing holdings from Aaron Burr in 1803–1804 and building Astor Mansion on a seventy-acre Hell Gate estate. Rather than develop, he leased plots—correctly predicting the city's northward expansion—and became one of America's wealthiest men.
At his 1848 death Astor's estate was worth $20 to $30 million—roughly one percent of the entire US economy at the time. He left most wealth to second son William because eldest John Jr. was sickly. He bequeathed $400,000 for the Astor Library, later part of the New York Public Library, and $50,000 for a Walldorf poorhouse. Senator Tallmadge quipped that one in every hundred US dollars ended in Astor's hands.
Source: John Jacob Astor
