Grace Arents

Grace Evelyn Arents (1848 – June 20, 1926) was an heiress, Christian activist and philanthropist in Richmond, Virginia. She inherited $20 million from her uncle Lewis Ginter, a tobacco business magnate and philanthropist, and she used the money to transform Richmond for the better.

Arents was born in Manhattan, New York, the youngest of four children of cedar barrel maker James Arents and his wife Jane Swain Gintner Arents.

When her husband died in 1855, Jane and her four young children received financial support from her uncle Lewis Ginter, a tobacco and streetcar business magnate, as well as Richmond real estate developer and philanthropist.

In 1879, Arents and her mother moved to Richmond and lived with their bachelor uncle in the Ginter House, an urban brownstone at 405 East Cary Street near the city's business district. Her brother George also lived with them briefly, but rejoined his other two sisters in New York, where he became an avid collector and benefactor of the New York Public Library.

Trained as a nurse, as was common with women in the deaconess movement of that era, Arent helped establish the Richmond chapter of the Instructional Visiting Nurse Association, which also drew upon the lessons of the Settlement House movement, exemplified by Jane Addams in Chicago, among other socially active women. Arents valued her privacy fiercely, as had her uncle, and avoided publicity. She also avoided an ostentatious lifestyle. Arents never posed for a public portrait and few images of her have been found. She supported the Episcopal Church and became known for her work among the city's poor, mostly in a self-effacing way, or simply through her checkbook.

...
Wikipedia