E. W. Marland

Ernest Whitworth Marland (May 8, 1874 – October 3, 1941) was an American lawyer, oil businessman in Pennsylvania and later Oklahoma, and politician who was a United States Representative (congressman) and 10th Governor of Oklahoma. He served in the United States House of Representatives (lower chamber of the Congress of the United States) from a district in northern Oklahoma, 1933 to 1935, and as the tenth Governor of Oklahoma from 1935 to 1939. As a Democrat, he initiated a "Little Deal" in Oklahoma during the Great Depression of the 1930s, working to relieve the distress of unemployed people and the economic hardships affecting the state and nation-wide and to build infrastructure as investment for the future.

Marland made his earlier fortunes in oil in Pennsylvania in the early 1900s and more later in Oklahoma during the 1920s, and lost each in the volatility of the industry and the times. At the height of his wealth in the 1920s, Marland built a mansion known as the Palace of the Prairies in Ponca City, after introducing fox hunts (and red foxes) and polo games on horseback to the local wealthy elite society. It has since been designated a National Historic Landmark. The Marland-Paris Mansion, his former home on Grand Avenue, is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places (listings maintained by the National Park Service of the United States Department of the Interior).

Marland and his first wife Virginia did not have any children. To share their wealth and help her sister Margaret Roberts and her family, in 1916 they adopted their two children, nephew and niece George and Lydie, who were then 19 and 16 years old. The Marlands sent them to private school and gave them other advantages. A decade later and two years after first wife Virginia's death in 1926, Marland had niece Lydie's adoption annulled. He then married her as Lydie Roberts Marland (1900-1987), that same year when she was age 26 years, and she later accompanied him during the subsequent decade of the 1930s to Washington, D.C. when he served in the U.S. Congress, and later in the governor's mansion in Oklahoma City.