A. Gracie King

Archibald Gracie King (July 11, 1821 – March 21, 1897) was a prominent American banker.

Early life King was born on July 11, 1821, in Everton, England near Liverpool. He was one of eleven children born to Sarah Rogers (née Gracie) King and James G. King. Among his siblings was banker Edward King. His father later served as President of New York and Erie Railroad and later became a U.S. Representative from New Jersey.

His paternal grandparents were Mary (née Alsop) King, a daughter of John Alsop (a prominent merchant and Continental Congressman) and Rufus King, the first U.S. Senator from New York and the 3rd and 8th U.S. Minister to the United Kingdom (under Presidents George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams). His maternal grandfather was Archibald Gracie, a Scottish-born shipping magnate and early American businessman and merchant in New York City and Virginia.

King was educated in America and at the school of Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg at Hofwyl near Bern, Switzerland, before attending Harvard College, from where he graduated in 1840, thirty years after his father.

He was elected trustee of the Institution for the Savings of Merchants' Clerks in 1861, treasurer in 1865, and president in 1873. Upon his retirement and relocation to New Jersey in 1881, he ended his affiliation with the bank ("the laws of New York requiring trustees of savings banks to be residents of New York").

Gracie King (1846–1846), who died young. Sara Gracie King (1850–1931), who married Frederic Bronson in 1875. Following his death in 1900, she married Adrian George Iselin Jr. in 1914. Frederick Gore King (1852–1937), who married Jessie Arklay, eldest daughter of Patrick Arklay, in 1877. After her death he married Marion Morrison, the librarian of the New York Society Library; he was secretary and treasurer of the Knickerbocker Trust Company.

King died on March 21, 1897, of bronchitis after a lingering illness at "Highwood," his country estate near Weehawken, New Jersey. After a funeral at Calvary Church in New York, he was buried at Grace Episcopal Church in Jamaica, Queens.

Descendants Through his daughter Maria, he was a grandfather of John Alexander Van Rensselaer, who married Helen F. Galindo in 1896, and who was arrested in 1908 for attempting to extort $5,000 from his mother; and Frederick Harold Van Rensselaer (1874–1903), who married Josephine Lucy Grinnell (a daughter of Robert Minturn Grinnell and Sophie Van Alen). who married Ambassador Lloyd Carpenter Griscom (a son of shipping magnate Clement Griscom).

Through his son Frederick, he was a grandfather of women's rights entrepreneur Alice Gore King.