William May Garland
American businessman (1866-1948)
William May Garland (March 31, 1866 – September 26, 1948) was an American business man, real estate developer, and public figure. He was the son of Jonathan May Garland and Rebecca Heagan Jewett, and his real estate company contributed greatly to the growth of Los Angeles in the years before and after 1900. He served as a member of the International Olympic Committee from 1922 to 1948, and he was responsible for bringing the 1932 Summer Olympics to Los Angeles. He would later become President of the Organising Committee for the Olympic Games for the 1932 Summer Olympics.
Early history
William May Garland was born in Westport, Maine on March 31, 1866. In 1882 at age 16, he went to Boston, and by 1884 he was in Chicago. In 1890, he moved to Los Angeles working as auditor of the Pacific Cable Railway Company until 1894, when he formed his real estate business, the W. M. Garland Company, headquartered in Henry Huntington's Pacific Electric Building, which became the site of the Jonathan Club. He was Huntington's principal sales agent. In September 1895, Garland and Huntington were among the founding members of the Jonathan Club. William May Garland's granddaughter was told that when deciding the name of the club, he said "let's call it the Jonathan Club after my father" (Jonathan Garland).
“William May Garland” enters the record as american businessman (1866-1948). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what William, Garland and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8015279. VIAF identifies the subject as 1584155345591506430009. The Library of Congress control number is no2019040235. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1866, 1948, 1900 and 1922.
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This entry incorporates text from “William May Garland” 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.