John Jacob Astor was a German-born American merchant who became the wealthiest man in the United States, building a fortune in the fur trade and New York real estate. Born near Heidelberg in 1763, he emigrated to America after the Revolution and entered the fur business, gradually building it into a vast commercial enterprise.
In 1808 he organized the American Fur Company, which came to dominate the trade across the continent, and in 1811 he founded the settlement of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. Astor invested his profits shrewdly in Manhattan real estate, which appreciated enormously as New York grew. By the end of his life he was the richest individual in the country, and on his death in 1848 he left a bequest to found what became the Astor Library, a foundation of the New York Public Library.