John Jacob Astor: Furs, Opium, and the Land Beneath Manhattan

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In the 1830s roughly one of every hundred dollars in the United States belonged to John Jacob Astor. This episode traces how a butcher's son born in Waldorf, Germany in 1763 became America's first multimillionaire. At 16 he left for London and his uncle's musical instrument business, where he absorbed the workings of global trade. On the voyage to Baltimore he spent weeks talking with a fur trader, and he stepped ashore in March 1784 with a new plan: buy pelts cheaply on the frontier and sell them to Europe's elite.

Astor's gift was reading politics as a supply chain problem. The Jay Treaty of 1794 let him plug into Canadian fur through the North West Company. When the Embargo Act of 1807 threatened to ruin him, he pitched President Jefferson on an all-American enterprise and founded the American Fur Company in 1808. He pushed to the Pacific, traded furs for tea and silk in Canton, and then, seeing silk hats replace beaver, sold out in 1834 and bet everything on Manhattan real estate.

• His wife Sarah Cox Todd brought a $300 dowry and ran the New York operation, judging and packing furs with a business sense Astor rated above most merchants.
• The Astor expedition founded Fort Astoria in April 1811, the first permanent United States settlement on the Pacific coast, and his men found the South Pass through the Rockies.
• In 1816 the American Fur Company bought 10 tons of Ottoman opium and shipped it to Canton aboard the Macedonian.
• Astor rarely built on his Manhattan land. Tenants on 21 year ground leases paid for construction, and the buildings reverted to him when the leases expired.
• He died on March 29, 1848, at 84, leaving an estate of $20 to $30 million and $400,000 for the Astor Library, a forerunner of the New York Public Library.