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John Jacob Astor was a fur magnate and founder of a renowned family of Anglo-American capitalists, business leaders, and philanthropists. His American Fur Company is considered the first American business monopoly.
Astor started a fur-goods shop in New York City about 1786 after learning about the fur trade while aboard the ship that took him to the U.S. Benefitting from the Jay Treaty between England and the U.S. (1794) that opened up new markets in Canada and the Great Lakes region, and from shrewd dealings with Indian tribes, he had by 1800 amassed $250,000 and become the leading figure in the fur trade. Given permission to trade in ports monopolized by the British East India Company, he made lucrative fur transactions in China (1800â17), but his plan to establish a network of fur-trading posts around Astoria (now in Oregon) failed when the British captured the post during the War of 1812.
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John Jacob Astor, detail of an oil painting by Gilbert Stuart, 1794; in the Brook Club, New York.
Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library
At the same time, however, Astor invested in New York City real estate that became the foundation of the family fortune. His son, William Backhouse Astor (1792â1875), greatly expanded the family real-estate holdings, building more than 700 stores and dwellings in New York City. The wealthiest person in the U.S. at the time of his death, the senior Astor bequeathed $400,000 for the founding of a public library, the Astor Library, in New York City, which was consolidated with others as the New York Public Library in 1895.
