Philanthropist Virginia B. Toulmin, whose more than $20 million legacy gift to The Dayton Foundation is the largest single gift in the Foundation’s 89-year history, died Sunday, June 13, in Sarasota, Fla. She was 84.

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. Her gift will more than double the Foundation’s discretionary grantmaking budget.

“It provides flexibility for literally generations on what are the most pressing needs we have in the community and how can we respond,” Parks said last year when Toulmin 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 was in Dayton on June 4 as one of three recipients of the first Jewels of the Gem City Awards. She was honored for her efforts to save the Dayton Woman’s Club on Ludlow Street and her philanthropic contributions to the city. The award was given by the Woman’s Club, the Friends of the Arcade and the YWCA Dayton.

Toulmin’s 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 practiced with his father in the downtown Dayton firm, Toulmin & Toulmin.

The former public health nurse was appointed to the board of Central Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a small Indiana company her husband 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 her husband’s 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.