Strong was the oldest of five children, and despite only a rudimentary rural education, became a clerk in a Wooster dry goods store to help support his family after the death of his father in 1840.

In the Panic of 1857, the business failed and Strong moved on to work for Farnham, Dale, and Company.

[6] Strong's victory was optimistically hailed by the New York press as representative of an epic defeat of Tammany Hall's "fraud, chicane, trickery, double-dealing and contempt for the moral sense of the community"[7] and the new mayor cast as standard-bearer of "a revolution that closes a dark and opens a bright era in the municipal affairs of New York.

[9] In the late 1890s, New York State legislators passed a law mandating bath houses for cities with more than 50,000 people.

Strong agreed with the law's necessity due to sanitation issues caused by overcrowding.

During the night, he worsened very quickly, and he died early that morning, leaving behind a wife and two adult children.

[17] His widow died of heart disease at The Mount, their daughter's residence in Lenox, Massachusetts (and the former home of author Edith Wharton), in July 1921.