At one period he owned a flourishing brass-foundry in Hester Street, and during his early married life his prosperity was uninterrupted.

But before many years had passed his business declined, and from one cause and another he never succeeded in re-establishing it.

This misfortune, occurring while even the eldest of the sons was still a lad, might easily have proved irreparable in more senses than one.

But the very fact that the ordinary gates to learning were so soon closed against these children caused the natural tendency they had toward knowledge to impel them all the more strongly in that shorter road to practical wisdom which leads through labor and experience.

The Hecker brothers were all hard at work while still mere children, and before John, the eldest, had attained to legal manhood, they had fixed the solid foundations of an enduring prosperity, and all need of further exertion on the part of their parents was over for ever.
Isaac Thomas Hecker, the third son and youngest child of this couple, was born in New York at a house in Christie Street, between Grand and Hester, December 18, 1819, when his mother was not yet twenty-four.
He survived her by twelve years only, she dying at the residence of her eldest son's widow in 1876, in the full possession of faculties which must have been of no common order.