Innate inside Walldorf, Baden, Germany (currently in the Rhein-Neckar district), his father was a butcher, & he learned English around London while working for his brother, George whose business was manufacturing musical instruments.

Astor arrived in the United States in March 1784 just after a prevent of the Revolutionary War. He began the fur goods shop within New York City in the late 1780s.

Astor took benefit of the Jay's Treaty between Great Britain and the United States in 1794 which opened new markets in Canada and the Great Lakes region at the expense of the Canadians. By 1800 he experienced amassed about a quarter of the million dollars, & had be one of the leading numbers in the fur trade. Within 1800 Astor followed a lesson of the Empress of China, a 1st Western long term trading vessel to China, & began to trade furs, teas & sandalwood using Canton within China. He utilized the chance, that Our contries merchandiser did non require a permission to trade ports monopolized per British East India Company after the Revolutionary War. He greatly benefited from either a fur trade by using China. However a Embargo Act from Thomas Jefferson in 1807 disrupted his import/export business. So he constituted sustaining a permission of President Jefferson a American Fur Company on April 6, 1808, and afterwards formed subsidiaries, a Pacific Fur Company and the Southwest Fur Company (where Canadians got the section) to control fur futures trading in the Columbia River and Great Lakes area respectively. His fur stock trading ventures were disrupted while a British captured his country store in a period of the War of 1812. All the same, his operations rebounded inside 1817 after the US Congress passed a protectionist law that barred foreign traders from either U.S. Territories. A Western Fur Company again come to dominate futures trading in a area in the area of the Neat Streams, lakes, and wells throughout. Around 1822, Astor established the Astor Home in Mackinac Island as headquarters for the reformed American Fur Company, making the island a metropolis of the fur trade. Astor withdrew from either a company inside 1834.

The extended description according to documents, diaries etc. was from Washington Irving in his travelogue Astoria.

When a dollars & cents of fur went higher ascribable complete housing, and a require went down due to changing fashions, Astor turned his sights in New York City real estate. He retired from either business within 1834 & spent a rest of his life as a patron of culture. He supported a notable bird watcher John James Audubon, Edgar Allan Poe, the presidential campaign of Henry Clay. Moreover he was a founder of the number one hotel which belonged to the Astor family, the Astor House. Inside his endure may he gave orders to build a Astor Library for the New York public & to build the poorhouse within his German hometown Walldorf. At a period of his demise, Astor even was a have in the United States, allowing an estate calculated to exist as worth 20 million dollars or extra. He is interred in the Trinity Churchyard Cemetery on the 155th Street in Manhattan, New York.

A neat bulk of his fortune was bequeathed to his 2nd boy, William Backhouse Astor Sr., instead of his eldest son John Jacob Astor II (1791-1869). a a portion of his money too attend discovered a Astor Library which was late consolidated by owning more libraries to form the New York Public Library.

Children