Charles Astor Bristed (1820-1874)

He was born in New York City and after his mother died in 1832 he was brought up with his grandfather at the Astor Mansion who employed Fitz-Greene Halleck as his live-in tutor and in 1835 they were joined by Washington Irving while he wrote Astoria (1836). Bristed graduated from both Yale (1839) and Trinity College, Cambridge (1845), with honors in Latin. He began studying for a Fellowship at Cambridge but instead returned home. He lived for some years in Paris and Baden-Baden in Germany, but in later years divided his time between New York City and the Astor Mansion at Hellgate (inherited in 1847) that he occasionally used as a summer home before acquiring a place at Lenox, Massachusetts. He was a frequent contributor to various newspapers and magazines, using the pen name "Carl Benson," and he published a number of books: Letters to Horace Mann; The Upper Ten Thousand; Five Years in an English University; The Interference Theory of Government; and, Pieces of a Broken-Down Critic. He was a Trustee of the Astor Library from its foundation, and as Secretary of the American Committee on International Copyright, he "should long be remembered with gratitude."

In 1847, he married Laura, daughter of Henry Brevoort, a lifelong friend of both Washington Irving and Philip Hone. They had a son (whose eccentricities were eventually diagnosed as lunacy) and they adopted a daughter. After she died, he married Grace Sedgwick and they had one son together. He died at his residence in Washington D.C.