Dorothea (Astor) Langdon (1795-1874)

She was born in New York and to the fury of her father eloped with her husband during the War of 1812 after a whirlwind romance. The Langdons preferred Europe to America. In the 1840s, in an effort to entice his daughter to stay in New York, Dorothea's father bought her not only what would become the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, but also The Langdon House in Manhattan. In 1847, her husband died and by 1852 Dorothea left America permanently for Europe, living off the $200,000 left to her by her father. She died in 1874 at Nice on the French Cote-d'Azur. She had six children.