Thomas Fortune Ryan (October 17, 1851 – November 23, 1928) was an American tobacco, insurance and transportation magnate. Although he lived in New York City for much of his adult career, Ryan was perhaps the greatest benefactor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Richmond in the decades before the Great Depression. In addition to paying for schools, hospitals and other charitable works, Ryan's donations paid for the construction of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond, Virginia. Ryan also made significant donations to Catholic institutions in New York City and Washington, D.C. Early days Thomas Fortune Ryan was born on October 17, 1851, near Lovingston, Virginia, the county seat of Nelson County. Despite a myth promulgated by Cleveland Amory regarding his background, Ryan was neither orphaned nor penniless as a youth, nor did his ancestors flee the Great Famine of Ireland as did many who worked on or rode his streetcars. Rural Virginia where Ryan grew up attracted few of those emigrants. Ryan's father was a tailor and managed a small hotel. He traced his ancestry to Protestant Anglo-Irish settlers who came to North America in the seventeenth century. Ryan's mother, Lucinda Fortune Ryan, died in 1856 when he was five years old. His father remarried and moved to Tennessee two years later. Ryan was raised as a Protestant by his mother's extended family in Lovingston, south of Charlottesville in Virginia's Piedmont. Local Baptist ministers taught the youth to read and write, but Ryan did not attend college. Before the American Civil War, Ryan and his younger brother owned three slaves. Conversion Aged 17, three years after the war ended, Ryan fled the lack of economic opportunity in post-war Virginia and moved to the nearest big city, Baltimore, Maryland with $100 in his pocket. En route, Ryan converted to Catholicism, purportedly after long discussions with the conductor. In Baltimore, John S. Barry, a prosperous dry goods merchant and Catholic, hired young Ryan. By 1872, Barry helped Ryan secure a brokerage assistant position on Wall Street where he would be tutored by William Collins Whitney. Fortune building Ryan opened a brokerage firm with two partners, Lee, Ryan & Warren, the following year. In 1873 Ryan married his former boss's daughter, Ida Mary Barry, whose family were devout Roman Catholics. They had eight children. In 1874, his firm purchased Ryan a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. At the same