The former businesswoman was the widow of international patent attorney Harry A. Toulmin Jr. and spent 41 years in the Dayton area.
“She was a truly remarkable woman and philanthropist, with an exceptionally kind and generous nature,” said Mike Parks, the foundation’s president.
Toulmin leaves behind the largest philanthropic legacy and ultimately unrestricted gift ever received by the foundation to use for the good of others in perpetuity, he said.
Toulmin’s gift will more than double the foundation’s discretionary grant-making budget.
“It provides flexibility for literally generations on what are the most pressing need we have in the community and how can we respond,” Parks said last year when she made the legacy gift, which was set up to be received by the foundation at the time of her death.
“I like the idea of having a gift that keeps on giving,” Toulmin, a former president of the Dayton Woman’s Club, told the Dayton Daily News in an interview last year.
Toulmin had returned to Oakwood a couple of years ago to have “the thrill of dinner at Hawthorn Hill,” home to aviation pioneer Orville Wright. There she dined with Amanda Wright Lane, the Wright brothers’ great-grandniece, and Lane’s brother, Stephen Wright.
“We just had a grand time,” recalled Toulmin, whose father-in-law Harry Aubrey Toulmin Sr. was the famed Springfield attorney who secured and defended the Wright brothers’ patent for their flying machine.
Her late husband also was a patent attorney who practiced with his father in the downtown Dayton firm, Toulmin & Toulmin.
Virginia Toulmin moved to the Dayton area in 1958 when she married Toulmin.
The former public health nurse met the VIP passenger while working as a stewardess nurse with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. He boarded the train in Cincinnati during his weekly travels between offices in Washington, D.C., Dayton and Springfield.
One day he asked her to lunch; a year later, they were married. Toulmin appointed his bride to the board of Central Pharmaceuticals Inc., a small Indiana company he had rescued from bankruptcy.
“He said to me, you speak the language because you’re a nurse,” recalled Toulmin, who had a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Washington University in St. Louis, where she grew up.
Upon his death in 1965, she became the company’s president and strived to fulfill his dream of growing the company.
In 1995, she sold the business for more than $178 million to German pharmaceutical giant Schwarz Pharma.
That became the basis of Toulmin’s philanthropy and enabled her to give something back.
She moved to Florida about eight years ago after 20 years of wintering there. She became deeply rooted in that cultural community and had given millions to the opera, theater and symphony, according to the Sarasota Herald Tribune.
Toulmin said she hoped her legacy gift in Dayton will be used “either for the humanities or for the arts,” but quickly added that she likes to give gifts with no strings attached. That’s why she decided to make it an unrestricted gift, remembering how her husband used to caution that one shouldn’t dictate from the grave.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2094 or mkissell@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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