Leland Doan
American chemical engineer, executive (1894-1974)
Leland "Lee" Doan was a businessman and member of the Dow family that served as president and CEO of the Dow Chemical Company. Doan led the company from 1949 to 1962 and transformed Dow from a firm that made chemicals for other companies into a familiar name and one of the world's largest chemical conglomerates.
Early years
Doan was born in 1894 in North Bend, Nebraska. He was the youngest of three boys of Ira Doan, a physician and surgeon, and his wife, Hester Spencer. His middle brother died at age 3 before Leland was born, and his father had a heart attack and died when Leland was 7. The mother and boys moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan where his older brother Wilson was enrolled at the University of Michigan (UM). Doan graduated from Ann Arbor High School and enrolled at UM where he met Ruth Alden Dow, also a student at UM. She was the daughter of Dow Chemical Company founder Herbert Henry Dow. They married in 1917 and Doan left school early for a job with Dow. The couple had three children: Leland Alden Jr (1918), Dorothy M. "Honey" (1921) and Herbert Dow "Ted" (1922). Doan joined the sales department and discovered that all sales were the responsibility of a handful of individuals.
“Leland Doan” enters the record as american chemical engineer, executive (1894-1974). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Leland, Doan and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Leland Doan” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Leland, Doan and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q124652730. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1962, 1894 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leland Doan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.