Robert Toll

Origins and early life

Robert Irwin Toll was born in Philadelphia on 30 December 1940, grew up in the suburb of Elkins Park and graduated from Germantown Academy.

Work and career

His father, Albert Toll, was a home builder; Robert Toll was Jewish, as the Chronicle of Philanthropy wrote of him and his wife Jane in 2019, and he served on the board of Beth Shalom Synagogue in Elkins Park. He earned a bachelor's degree in political science at Cornell University in 1963 and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966, then practised law in Philadelphia for a year. In 1967 he founded Toll Brothers with his younger brother Bruce, and the two began by building their first two colonial-style houses in suburban Philadelphia, on land in Chester County given to them by their father.

He led the company as chairman and chief executive from its founding until 2010, taking this builder of luxury homes beyond the Northeast to the Washington area in the late 1980s and to California in the mid-1990s. As a boy he had attended a summer camp in Maine on the grounds later used by Seeds of Peace, a camp founded in 1993 by the journalist John Wallach, and he and Jane made it the centrepiece of their giving, doubling their support to $4 million.

Jane Toll, a teacher for many years, started a programme with Say Yes to Education in 1990, and in May 2019 the couple signed the Giving Pledge. He also served on the boards of the University of Pennsylvania and its law school, the Metropolitan Opera, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Red Cross and the Cornell Real Estate Council. Robert Toll died of Parkinson's disease at his home in Manhattan on 7 October 2022, survived by Jane, their five children and twelve grandchildren.