John Taylor Johnston

John Taylor Johnston (April 8, 1820 – March 24, 1893) was an American businessman and patron of the arts. He served as president of the Central Railroad of New Jersey and was one of the founders of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Early life Johnston was born on April 8, 1820, in New York City. He was the eldest child of John Johnston and Margaret (née Taylor) Howard Johnston, a widow of Rhesa Howard Jr. who was the nephew of William Few, Signer of the U.S. Constitution from Georgia whose brother-in-law was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. His younger brother was James Boorman Johnston, who commissioned the Tenth Street Studio Building at 51 West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. His sister, Margaret Taylor Johnston, was married to John Bard (a grandson of Dr. Samuel Bard) and together were founders of Bard College. Both of his parents were of Scottish ancestry, and his father was a prominent businessman with Boorman, Johnston, & Co. and was a co-founder of Washington Square North. His mother had four siblings who, likewise, married two grandchildren, a great-granddaughter, and a nephew of founding father Roger Sherman, Signer of the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Declaration of Independence from Connecticut. Johnson grew up in Greenwich Village, where he was born, and was educated at Edinburgh High School in Edinburgh, Scotland. He graduated from the University of the City of New York, an institution founded by his father and several other civic-minded New Yorkers, in 1839. He later studied at Yale Law School, where his classmates included Charles Astor Bristed, Daniel D. Lord, and Henry G. DeForest.