The death this week of Lyman F. Spitzer marked not only the loss of an eminent local attorney, but also the passing of one of the last members of Toledo's great patrician families.

The Spitzers were among the city's few true “founding families,” clans who played an outsized role in Toledo's commercial, industrial, and cultural development in that spectacular period that spanned the late 19th century and well into the 20th.

It was an age before the local business titan was overshadowed by the boardrooms of multinational corporations. In Toledo, families such as the Knights, Stranahans, Libbeys, Secors, Boeschensteins, and Fords captained industry, filled the social registry, and endowed lasting civic institutions.

Though the city's great surnames never held near the wealth and power of their Eastern Seaboard counterparts, they wielded enormous influence in their local sphere of northwest Ohio. They were dynasties who lived by a now-fading notion of civic duty, noblesse oblige. Mr. Spitzer, who died Monday at age 61, was of that dynamic breed.

“Lyman Spitzer was a manifestation of what was good about Toledo,” said John Robinson Block, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Blade. “He was one of the last of the great families of Toledo.”

Men such as Gen. Ceilan Milo Spitzer and Adelbert Lorenzo Spitzer — Mr. Spitzer's great-grandfather — founded the city's first prominent investment bank in the 1880s, Spitzer & Co.

The firm held the distinction of being the first investment house west of New York City to engage exclusively in bond sales. According to a news account of the day, it was “the father of the municipal bond business of the middle west.”

In the 1890s, the cousins built the famous Spitzer Building at the corner of Madison Avenue and Huron Street, the city's first steel skyscraper. In 1905, the Spitzers erected the 16-story Nicholas Building on the opposite side of the intersection. They named the structure in honor of A. L. Spitzer's grandfather, Nicholas Spitzer.

Lyman P. Spitzer's grandfather, who was also a Lyman, founded the former Spitzer Paper Box Co. in Toledo. Like many males of the family, the elder Lyman Spitzer was brought up in Toledo but attended boarding school and then college in New England, often at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.

The local Spitzers made their way to Toledo from New York state. A. L. Spitzer was among the first of the Ohio-born Spitzers and was reared on a farm in Medina County. He was descended from Dr. Ernestus De Spitzer, who emigrated from Germany in 1747 and settled in Schenectady, N.Y. On his mother's side, A. L. Spitzer was descended from James Thompson, who came from England in 1630 and was among the first settlers of Charlestown, Mass, according to a 1901 biography of the Spitzer family.

Another maternal ancestor of A. L. Spitzer was John Thompson, who published the influential Thompson Bank Note Reporter in the 1700s. later established the Chase National Bank of New York, which he named in honor of his close friend Salmon P. Chase, the former Ohio governor and Secretary of the Treasury who was instrumental in promoting the U.S. banking system.

There appear to be no known direct relations between the Ohio Spitzers and the relatives of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

By the middle of the 20th century, the Spitzer family had added science achievement to its legacies in business and law. Lyman F. Spitzer's late uncle, Lyman Spitzer, Jr., became one of the youngest-ever chairmen of the astronomy department at Princeton University at the age of 32. The astrophysicist was regarded as the father of the Hubble Space Telescope and led early studies of nuclear fusion.

Lyman F. Spitzer majored in physics at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., but ultimately chose to follow his father, John, who survives him, into the legal profession.

The late Lyman Spitzer and the Spitzer family symbolized brilliance of mind and appreciation of outdoors life, former Toledo Mayor Carty Finkbeiner said.

And something else: “The Spitzers have contributed immensely to the arts and social scene over decades,” Mr. Finkbeiner said. “The Spitzers felt extremely responsible for encouraging [an] appreciation for our community and the work that went on before, and the responsibility for the younger generation to sustain the good work that had gone before.”

Mr. Finkbeiner said as a student at Maumee Valley Country Day School, he visited friends who were part of the legacy families of Toledo.

“I learned about how normal and natural and unpretentious they were,” Mr. Finkbeiner said. “Their parents were quite encouraging to be involved in the community and do good work.”

The Spitzers were among the most accomplished of the old families. “As the saying goes, their name's on the building,” said Jonathan Orser, a former Perrysburg mayor and council member.

Mr. Orser's ancestors were pioneers in the American glass industry. His great-great-grandfather, John Baptiste Ford, founded the company that became PPG Industries in Pittsburgh. His great-grandfather was Edward Ford, founder of Edward Ford Glass Co., which merged with the Libbey-Owens Co. to form the Libbey-Owens-Ford Co.

And Mr. Orser's grandfather, George Ross Ford, was president and treasurer before the merger, and then was a director of L-O-F. “A lot of those families were connected to manufacturing, and a lot of those businesses aren't here any more or [family members] have taken on different lives elsewhere,” Mr. Orser said.

Staff writer Mark Zaborney contributed to this report.

Contact JC Reindl at:

jreindl@theblade.com,

or 419-724-6065.

First Published January 13, 2011, 12:57 p.m.