David Hosack - Personal Life

Personal Life

Close to two years after his wife Catharine died, Hosack married again, to Mary Eddy of Philadelphia, with whom he had nine children—seven of whom survived to adulthood. She was the sister of Thomas Eddy (1758–1827) of Philadelphia. Eddy was a prominent philanthropist and prison reformer. A confirmed family man, Hosack gained a reputation as one who enjoyed living well. Becoming a very popular medical practitioner and professor in the years to come, ever a visionary and liberal spender willing to sacrifice his wealth to his interests, he became quite the paterfamilias.

Not surprisingly, Hosack was the founder and first president of the New York Horticultural Society, the first such organization in America. As honorary members, he brought in his old friend Sir James Edward Smith as well as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Marquis de Lafayette (Robbins 1964, 174-175). He was president of the Literary Society and the Philosophical Society and one of the founders of the New-York Historical Society—and its fourth president (1820–1827).

After Mary died in 1824, he married Magdalena Coster, a widow of one of his friends and a mother with seven children of her own. The families were combined with rare success, living in a house on Chambers Street and maintaining a country estate for summer getaways on Kip’s Bay—both part of the Coster inheritance. Every Saturday, the Hosacks hosted a salon remarkable for the leading artists and intellectuals as well as other medical men who attended, and they became well known as social leaders in the city (Robbins 1964, 166). Hosack befriended the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) and was a patron of American artists including Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of telegraphy, and Thomas Cole.

In later life, with his third wife’s family assets to assist in his enterprises, David Hosack was able to purchase the famous Hudson River estate of Hyde Park, former home of his old teacher and sometime partner in medical practice Dr. Samuel Bard, and he recommenced developing a fine botanical garden. The Hosack’s opulent “retreat” became a popular haunt of visitors who enjoyed the mystique of the Hudson River valley, including not only painters and naturalists but the writer Washington Irving.

He died under tragic circumstances, of shock, a few days after a fire in New York City destroyed his personal property valued at $300,000.