Trade merchant and philanthropist. He was a sixth-generation descendant of Thomas Whitmore, who immigrated to Boston in 1635 from the west coast of England and became one of the earliest settlers of the Connecticut Colony. William was mentored by an uncle, Samuel Wetmore, who was in a mercantile partnership with another uncle, Chauncy Whittlesey, in Middletown, Connecticut. In 1815 Samuel and his brother William Willard Wetmore moved to Providence, Rhode Island entering into a business partnership with the merchants Edward Carrington & Company. When William was fourteen years of age, he was hired aboard the ship Fame, bound for England, South America, and the East Indies. In 1823, a trip on the Lion stranded him in Valparaíso, Chile. He took employment in Chile with the firm Richard Alsop of Middletown, Connecticut. This eventually led to a partnership of Alsop, Wetmore and Cryder in 1825 with John Cryder of Philadelphia. In 1829, he retired from the firm. In 1833, he traveled to Canton, China and took over a partnership in Dunn & Company. He formed close ties with a junior partner Joseph Archer. He went on to establish a new merchant house, Wetmore & Company, with Joseph Archer. Wetmore's profit and loss ledgers from 1834–1839 reveal that the primary goods brokered by Wetmore & Co. were tea, tea papers, silks and spices. Lesser cargoes were wines, ports, opium, hemp, pearl buttons, copper and coffee. They also transported a variety of foreign currencies, and delivered Sunday newspapers. "Fast boats" were commonly employed for personal passages and letters. The company went on to be one of the largest mercantile houses in the East Indies despite the fact that Wetmore was opposed to the opium trade. During his time in the Far East, Wetmore collected a variety of Chinese objects, porcelains and china, which he imported home. In 1837, William went to England and married a cousin, Esther Phillips Wetmore of Middletown, Connecticut, at Gloucester Lodge, Regent's Park, London, on October 24, 1837. She was the daughter of his uncle Samuel Wetmore and a sister of Mary Cryder. The following year, a daughter was born in New York City, who died at birth or soon thereafter on October 12, 1838. Esther died on October 26, 1838. After her death, he married 21-year-old Anstiss Derby Rogers in Salem, Massachusetts, on September 5, 1843, daughter of John Wittingham Rogers. They had three children, William, George, and Annie. In 1844, he revisited his partnership with Cryder and formed the house of Wetmore and Cryder in New York City. He retired from the firm in 1847. According to Barrett in The Old Merchants of New York City, besides his success in the merchant trade, Wetmore acquired vast land holdings of 10,000 acres in Ohio and 70,000 acres in Tennessee and his net worth at retirement was valued over one million dollars. He left New York City and retired to Newport, Rhode Island where he bought 15 acres of land. He built Chateau-sur-Mer, the first of the grand Bellevue Avenue mansions of the Gilded Age in Newport, Rhode Island. It is now open to the public as a museum. He furnished it with "strange and interesting" Chinese lacquer furniture and porcelain. In 1860 he added a massive stone moon gate on the grounds from designs brought back from China. William Died at Chateau-sur-Mer and was buried in the family plot at Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Bio By: Wikipedia