The Marland Grand Home (also known as Marland's Grand Home, the Grand Home, and the Marland-Paris Home) is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Grand Home is the first home built by Oklahoma Oilman E. W. Marland in Ponca City, Oklahoma and is considered a landmark in the community. The Grand Home was given its name because the home is on Grand Avenue in Ponca City, the community where Marland lived from 1908 until his death in 1941 and the city where he founded the Marland Oil Company (which later merged with and became Conoco) and where he built his Ponca City oil refinery, still in operation today more than 100 years later. Marland's Grand Home is a 1910s period mansion built in the Italian Renaissance Revival style. The Grand Home is owned by the City of Ponca City and includes exhibit rooms for Miller Brothers 101 Ranch history, Native American archaeology, artifacts and art, and Daughters of the American Revolution exhibits. The Grand Home was formerly known as the Ponca City Cultural Center Museum.
History and description
After Marland hit his first oil well in 1911, Marland and his wife Virginia moved from the Arcade Hotel in Ponca City to a home on North 6th Street while Marland had his Grand Home built. Designed by architect Solomon Layton, construction of the Grand Home began in 1914 and was completed in 1916. Marland lived in the home until 1928 when he moved onto the huge estate he had built on 640 acres outside of Ponca City, the Marland Mansion. During this era E.W.'s net worth, not including his oil company, exceeded 100 million dollars, over a billion in today's standards.
The first floor of the Grand Home is decorated with period furnishings, art, china and silver services and family photos that evoke the Marland era. The Grand Home featured a central vacuuming system, an automatic dishwasher, and an indoor swimming pool, all considered fabulous luxuries at the time. Later when Marland's wife Virginia became ill with cancer in 1919, Marland had a Frigidaire indoor central air-conditioning installed in the Grand Home. The massive unit cooled only one room to keep Virginia Marland comfortable before she died from pneumonia on June 7, 1926. The Grand Home also featured an attached three-car garage along with an additional three-bay carriage house.
According to the application with the National Park Service for the Grand Home to be designated a historic landmark:
The mansion sets (sic) at the summit of quite a rise of ground while gradually sloping away are a series of terraced gardens ending with the greenhouse at the foot, there being six acres in this garden surrounded with a line of tall growing trees resembling poplars. This is an enchanted spot with its rose gardens, pond lily basins, where all the familiar flowers of the north vie with the lovely varieties of the semi-tropics running a perfect riot.
The one-time home of Oklahoma's 12th governor is more than a magnificent mansion ordered into existence by a millionaire oilman. It is a majestic monument in stone to one of the last of a "breed" - a fantastically successful wildcatter, a rags-to-riches individualist, an ambitious empire who created on the frontier a classic European villa where but a few decades earlier there had been only tepees.
It was in 1914, just three years after his initial strike, that he first decided to build for himself a home more worthy of his increasing wealth and growing importance in the petroleum industry. This 22-room white stucco mansion at the east end of Ponca City's main street, Grand Avenue, is the result. It was completed in time for Christmas 1916. And for the next twelve years it was the scene of elaborate parties and increasingly important gatherings of social, political, entertainment world, and business figures from around Oklahoma and the country. Marland introduced fox hunting to the area and soon the white mansion was hosting redcoated hunters to traditionally sumptuous hunt breakfasts. Parties were held after polo matches and horse shows.
Marland particularly enjoyed the indoor swimming pool in the Grand Home, the first indoor pool in Oklahoma. Even though his younger lieutenants (as he called his upper management employees) could beat him on the athletic field, Marland said he could outlast them in the pool.
The Grand Home cost approximately $350,000 to build, equivalent to about $3.5 million in 2021 dollars. The Grand Home, at 16,500 square feet, included 22-rooms and was created in the Italian Renaissance Revival style.