The Dayton Foundation is receiving a legacy gift of more than $20 million from a longtime Dayton-area resident that will be the largest single gift in the foundation's 88-year history.

Philanthropist Virginia Toulmin spent 41 years in the Dayton area and remembers it as a "very happy part of my life."

The former businesswoman and widow of international patent attorney Harry A. Toulmin Jr., now resides in Florida.

"The Dayton Foundation is honored to be entrusted with this incredibly generous gift," Michael Parks, the foundation's president, said. "This gift, which ultimately will carry no restrictions of the Dayton Foundation for how it can best be used to benefit Greater Dayton, will have a tremendous impact on our region over time."

Because the gift later will fund a permanent endowment, foundation officials said the Toulmins' legacy will work to improve the quality of life for people throughout the community in perpetuity.

A former president of the Dayton Woman's Club, Toulmin said in an interview from her Sarasota home, "I like the idea of having a gift that keeps on giving."

Toulmin returned to Oakwood last spring 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 here 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 seven years ago after 20 years of wintering there. She is now deeply rooted in that cultural community and has given millions to the opera, theater and symphony, according to the Sarasota Herald Tribune.

Toulmin hopes her legacy gift 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.

"I think the management under Mike Parks is very good," she said. "Since I'm not in Dayton anymore, I know he knows far more than I do where the best place is to give the gifts."

Parks noted that 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.

Initially grants from the fund will be advised by a committee, which will include the foundation president, to support the Toulmins' charitable interests in the Dayton area. In time, it will become an unrestricted fund to help address needs and opportunities in the community through the foundation's competitive grant-making process, as approved by its governing board.

Toulmin likes being able to make a difference.

"It's a rewarding feeling," she said. "It makes you feel as you get older you can still accomplish a lot."