Charlotte Augusta Gibbes

Charlotte Augusta Gibbes (February 27, 1825 – December 12, 1887) was an American philanthropist and co-founder of the New York Cancer Hospital, the first hospital in the United States dedicated exclusively to the treatment of cancer. She personally funded $225,000 (equivalent to approximately $7.5 million in 2024) for the hospital’s first wing. The institution opened on December 7, 1887. Charlotte died of uterine cancer five days later. She never entered the building she built. The hospital later became Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the world’s oldest and largest private cancer center.

Charlotte was the wife of John Jacob Astor III and the mother of William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, she descended from Robert Gibbes (1644–1715), Governor of the Province of Carolina, and was connected through marriage to three of the four South Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence. Through her maternal family, she was a first cousin of Alexander Hamilton’s grandchildren. Her 1846 marriage to Astor united one of the oldest colonial families in the American South with the largest fortune in the American North and produced a dynasty that extended into the British peerage, the House of Commons, and the British Royal Family.

Early life

Charlotte was born on February 27, 1825, in Charleston, South Carolina, the daughter of Thomas Ellis Gibbes, a descendant of colonial Governor Robert Gibbes, and Susan Annette Van den Heuvel. Her maternal heritage was rooted in Dutch colonial New York.

Charlotte’s maternal grandfather, Baron Jan Cornelis van den Heuvel (1742–1826), was a Dutch-born plantation owner and politician who served as governor of the Dutch colony of Demerara (now part of Guyana) from 1765 to 1770 and later became a merchant in New York City with the Dutch West India Company. After arriving in New York in 1790, he purchased 400 acres in the Bloomingdale district of upper Manhattan and established a city residence at the corner of Broadway and Barclay Street, the present site of the Woolworth Building. He was elected a director of the U.S. Branch Bank in 1801.

Through Van den Heuvel’s daughters, Charlotte was connected to several prominent American families. Her maternal aunt Maria Eliza Van den Heuvel married John Church Hamilton (son and biographer of Alexander Hamilton), making Charlotte a first cousin of Hamilton’s grandchildren, including Civil War generals Alexander Hamilton and Schuyler Hamilton. Another aunt, Margaret Van den Heuvel, married Ralph Isaacs Ingersoll, U.S. representative from Connecticut and Minister to Russia under President James K. Polk; their son Charles Roberts Ingersoll served as Governor of Connecticut from 1873 to 1877, and their son Colin Macrae Ingersoll served as a U.S. Congressman.

The idea for a dedicated cancer hospital originated with Elizabeth Hamilton Cullum (1831–1884), Charlotte’s first cousin and the granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton through his son John Church Hamilton. Cullum was the widow of Henry Halleck, General-in-Chief of all U.S. Armies under Lincoln (1862–1864), and the wife of Major General George Washington Cullum, Superintendent of West Point. After losing her only son to cancer in 1882 and being diagnosed herself in 1883, Cullum assembled a circle of New York’s most powerful philanthropists. Charlotte and John Jacob Astor III became the project’s principal benefactors after the Woman’s Hospital refused Astor’s offer to fund a cancer pavilion within its walls. Joining them were John E. Parsons, the foremost corporate lawyer in Gilded Age New York and chief counsel to the Sugar Trust, who served as the hospital’s first president from 1884 to 1915; and Joseph William Drexel, partner at Drexel, Morgan & Co. (the predecessor of JPMorgan Chase), brother of Anthony Drexel (J. P. Morgan’s mentor and senior partner), and uncle of Saint Katharine Drexel.

On May 31, 1884, the group laid the cornerstone for the New York Cancer Hospital at 455 Central Park West. It was the first hospital in the United States dedicated exclusively to cancer, and only the second in the world after the London Cancer Hospital.

The hospital received its first patients on December 7, 1887. Charlotte died five days later, on December 12, of uterine cancer. She was sixty-two years old. She had not entered the hospital she built. Two of the institution’s principal female founders were killed by the disease it was created to treat.

In 1893, the hospital appointed William B. Coley, who developed an early form of immunotherapy, earning him the title “Father of Immunotherapy.” In 1921, Marie Curie visited the hospital to inspect its four grams of radium. The institution merged in 1960 with the Sloan Kettering Institute to become Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Charlotte’s extended family connected through marriage to three of the four South Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence: Arthur Middleton, through Mary “Polly” Gibbes’s marriage to his brother Thomas; Thomas Heyward Jr., through Elizabeth Mathews; and Edward Rutledge, the youngest signer, through his marriage to Henrietta Middleton. All three were captured together during the Siege of Charleston in 1780 and imprisoned at St. Augustine, Florida.

The New England Gibbs

The South Carolina branch descends from two sons of Stephen Gibbs (c. 1562–1594) of Saltwood Castle, Kent, who emigrated first to Barbados and then to Carolina. The American branch retained the older English spelling “Gibbes,” while the English side eventually modernized to “Gibbs.” Y-DNA analysis has identified a genetic haplogroup (I-M253) shared by living English Gibbs men with ancestry in Kent, with a partial match to a Gibbes descendant in North America.

The Warwickshire branch produced a parallel American dynasty. Robert Gibbs, fourth son of Sir Henry Gibbs of Honington Hall (granted by the Crown to the Gibbes family in 1540), emigrated to Boston around 1658, where he became a distinguished merchant. His son Henry graduated from Harvard College in 1685, establishing a family association with Harvard that persisted for generations; from the early colonial period through the early Republic, there was always a Henry Gibbs associated with the college. Henry Gibbs of Salem (1668–1723) served as Justice of the Peace, Judge, and Clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives; he is credited with preventing the spread of witchcraft persecutions to Watertown in 1692–93.

The Gibbs of Rhode Island married into the Wolcott family of Connecticut: George Gibbs III (Yale College, class of 1800) married Laura Wolcott, daughter of Oliver Wolcott Jr., Secretary of the Treasury under John Adams and Governor of Connecticut, and granddaughter of Oliver Wolcott, signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. George Gibbs III assembled the largest private mineral collection in America, which Yale purchased in 1825, forming the foundation of its geological holdings; the mineral gibbsite was named for him.

Josiah Willard Gibbs served as professor of sacred literature at Yale from 1826 to 1861 and is remembered for locating an interpreter for the African captives of the ‘’Amistad’’ in 1839, enabling their testimony during the trial.

The Bowes-Lyon connection

Charlotte’s granddaughter Pauline Astor (1880–1972) married Herbert Spender-Clay, Conservative MP. Their daughter Rachel Spender-Clay married the Hon. David Bowes-Lyon (1902–1961), youngest brother of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and uncle of Queen Elizabeth II. Their son Simon Bowes-Lyon (b. 1932) was a first cousin of the queen and served as Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire.

‘‘The Times’’, Field Marshal Haig, and the House of Windsor

William Waldorf’s younger son John Jacob Astor V, 1st Baron Astor of Hever (1886–1971), served as chief proprietor of ‘’The Times’’ of London from 1922 to 1966, placing two of Britain’s most influential newspapers simultaneously in the hands of Charlotte Gibbes’s grandsons during much of the twentieth century. His wife, Lady Violet Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, was the daughter of Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 4th Earl of Minto, Governor General of Canada and Viceroy of India.