David Sinton

David Sinton (26 June 1808 – 31 August 1900) was a pig-iron industrialist, born in County Armagh, Ireland, who became one of the wealthiest people in America.

Sinton was the son of linen manufacturer John Sinton, of Unshinagh, a Quaker (he was a cousin of Irish Quaker industrialist brothers Thomas Sinton and John Sinton), and Mary McDonnell. The family came to America, from Ireland, and settled at Pittsburgh when he was three years of age. Sinton had one brother (Dr. William Sinton, a physician) and two sisters (Isabella Eliza - never left Ireland and Sarah, married John Sparks - a banker).

A man of "irregular education", his business interests centered on the manufacture of iron; the location of his furnaces was Lawrence County, Ohio. Much of his fortune was made by pig iron, waiting for the American Civil War and the selling that iron on at inflated prices.

He was described as "a large, strong person with strong common sense, and therefore moves solely on the solid foundation of facts." His residence, at Cincinnati, was the old Longworth mansion on Pike Street, built by Martin Baum early in the 19th century. Mr. Sinton's only surviving child, Annie, was the wife of Charles Phelps Taft, editor of the Times-Star and brother of William Howard Taft; Sinton money was said to have financed the presidential bid. He was the great-grandfather of First World War flying ace David Sinton Ingalls.

Upon his death, age 93, he left $20,000,000 (the 2011 equivalent of this is about $500,000,000) to his daughter, he was Ohio's richest man at the time. His home is now the Taft Museum of Art. During his lifetime, Sinton was philanthropic in his donations to the arts and the Presbyterian church, yet his own father's grave was not marked with a headstone; "but David Sinton is wiser in his generation than they who seek to stab his character in such a paragraph [as erecting an ornate sepulcher]. He is one of God's noblemen."

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