Background
Jacob was born on August 13, 1810 in Manheim Township, York County, Pa. He was the son of Christian and Christiana (Badger) Thom or Tome.
banker merchant philanthropist
Jacob was born on August 13, 1810 in Manheim Township, York County, Pa. He was the son of Christian and Christiana (Badger) Thom or Tome.
He attended the district schools.
On his father's death, he went to work on a farm in York County. For the succeeding seven years he held various jobs in the vicinity, even teaching a country school for a season in spite of his meager education.
In 1833 he went to Port Deposit, Md. , where he made his home for the remainder of his life, except for a brief stay in Philadelphia that winter to study banking. The next year he was engaged as a clerk in a lumber dealer's office.
In 1835 David Rinehart, a lumber merchant from Marietta, Pa. , proposed a partnership, though Tome had nothing but labor to invest, and on Rinehart's death in 1851 the original capitalization of $5, 000 had been multiplied many times. Tome continued to make money in lumber by forming a partnership with John and Thomas C. Bond in 1855. Since Port Deposit was equally well placed for a steamship line, Tome in 1849 organized, with others, a company that ran steamers between Baltimore and Port Deposit. In 1865 a line between Baltimore and Fredericksburg was established. He also interested himself in railroads and continued to profit in both these fields the rest of his life.
His success in the field of banking was even more striking. Establishing the Cecil Bank at Port Deposit in 1850 with a capitalization of $25, 000, two decades later he owned banks at Elkton, Hagerstown, Md. , and Fredericksburg, Va. , with a total value of millions. He also owned stock in many other banks of Maryland. His real-estate holdings in Cecil County alone at the time of his death were estimated at one million dollars.
He died of pneumonia in Port Deposit at the age of 87 and was buried there at Hopewell Cemetery. At his death, he owned about $89 million (about $2, 618, 024, 000 today).
He built the Tome Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church at Port Deposit.
He was a Republican and a supporter of Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War.
In the political world he was not quite so successful. As a reward for patriotic unionism, he was elected to the Maryland Senate in 1863 and again the following year, gravitating naturally to the chairmanship of the finance committee. In 1871 he was put up by the Unionists as a candidate for governor; but he was defeated by the Democratic candidate, William Pinkney Whyte.
His letters are scarce, but such as have been found of a business nature depict an extremely busy yet sagacious man, terse, direct, very strict in his banking methods, and making his point in spite of the handicap of a meager education with the telltale misspellings and grammatical mistakes.
At Port Deposit he married, on December 6, 1841, Caroline M. Webb, an aunt of John A. J. Creswell. After her death he married on October 1, 1884, Eva S. Nesbitt, of the same place. His children all died in infancy.
His widow Evalyn Nesbitt Tome, was the richest woman in the state of Maryland; she later married Joseph Irwin France (Senator and U. S. presidential candidate).