Thomas Fortune Ryan (1851 - 1928) was a U.S. tobacco and transport businessman. Part of his fortune paid for the construction of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond, Virginia. Wikipedia
Thomas Fortune Ryan was the son of Virginia’s Piedmont and a product of the Reconstruction-era South. There is no comprehensive biography on him, and because he was highly private, his paper trail is thin, so half-truths and myths are rampant. Historian www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=9709
The definitive Wikipedia entry for Thomas Fortune Ryan. Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Fortune_Ryan
