Herter married Susan Dows in 1885, and fathered three daughters (Mary, Christine, and Susan), and two sons died in infancy. Mary Dows became a noted publisher, Christine Herter became a painter, and Susan married the artist Ernest Benham Dielman. Christian Herter died aged 45 of a neurological wasting disease, possibly myasthenia gravis. Henry Drysdale Dakin, who had worked in Herter's lab since 1905, married Herter's widow in 1916. They moved the house and laboratory in the 1920s to a newly constructed estate named Edgehill, at Scarborough-on-Hudson, near Scarsdale, New York and continued Herter's unfinished research.