New York City Society Leader. Caroline Webster Schermerhorn, the future Mrs. Astor, was born into a socially prominent, wealthy family descended from the early patroons who had established themselves in the Dutch colony of New Netherland in the seventeenth century. Its capital, New Amsterdam, would be renamed New York City upon the English acquisition of the Dutch colony in 1664 and it was predominantly from the more prominent Dutch colonial families that Manhattan's old Knickerbocker aristocracy descended. Caroline Schermerhorn was born into a world of wealth and social prominence, assured of her place within it. She was married on September 23, 1853 to William Backhouse Astor, Jr. at Trinity Church (Manhattan). Astor was the scion of what was then one of the wealthiest families in America. Caroline and her husband were to have five children. As her children became adults in the years following the Civil War, she became increasingly active in New York society. William and Caroline Astor acquired a fashionable brownstone on Fifth Avenue and maintained a summer "cottage" in Newport, Beechwood, in addition to owning a 2,800 acre country estate, Ferncliff, in Rhinebeck, New York. Her force of personality and social credentials, combined with her husband's wealth, helped Caroline Astor to emerge as the undisputed leader of New York society. She was aided in this endeavor by Ward McAllister and between them defined who belonged to New York society, basing membership on both pedigree and old money. It was McAllister who coined the term the four hundred, claiming that there were only 400 people in New York Society, that number supposedly reflecting the maximum number of guests who could comfortably fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom. The period, from shortly after the Civil War to about 1900, would come to be labeled the Gilded Age based on the title of a novel co-written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, published in 1873. The period saw the creation of vast fortunes that would come to dwarf those of old money New York Knickerbocker society. Mrs. Astor looked at these new money parvenus with disdain and this inevitably led to a conflict that would mark a turning point in New York social history when she acknowledged Alva Vanderbilt, the wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, in 1883. The Vanderbilts were the wealthiest of the new money crowd and Mrs. Astor's acknowledgement provided the Vanderbilts acceptance by old New York's Knickerbocker society. Following the death of Charlotte Augusta (Gibbes) Astor, the wife of her husband's elder brother, John Jacob Astor III, in 1887, Caroline began to refer to herself simply as "Mrs. Astor," which would result in increased tension between her branch of the Astor family and the family of her husband's nephew, William Waldorf Astor, leading to the nephew's removal from America and establishment in England, where he became a British subject and was made a peer, eventually being granted the title Viscount Astor in 1917 by King George V. Caroline Astor resided with her son following the death of her husband and suffered from dementia and increasing physical frailty for the last years of her life. She was interred at Trinity Church Cemetery in northern Manhattan and her daughter, Caroline (Astor) Wilson, erected a commemorative cenotaph, 39 feet tall, in the small Trinity Churchyard at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street.