JESSE A. MARLEY. One of the promoters of the town of Hastings, and in other ways conspicuously identified with the founding and development of the town is Jesse A. Marley, who came to the county August 7, 1901. Having purchased the business of the old Independent Mutual Townsite Company of Oklahoma with which he had been associated as salesman, he replatted the town and refiled the plat, and has since been busy in dealing in town real estate and promoting its development as a business and residence center. From a farm adjoining the town, he carved two of the well known additions, known as the Marley Addition and South Hastings. In 1902 he was appointed United States commissioner for the apportionment of the lots.
     Mr. Marley was one of the organizers and first directors of the First National Bank of Hastings. He managed the financial affairs connected with the location and equipment of the South-western Academy at this place in 1904, and by contributions to educational and religious movements and in many other ways has assisted in the making of Hastings. Mr. Marley, who was born in Carroll county, Arkansas, November 4, 1876, was reared in the atmosphere of hard work and was handicapped by lack of schooling. Two three-month terms were the principal advantages that he had in this line, and for the rest he had to improve such opportunities as came to him. Planting corn at fifty cents a day was one boyhood employment that he remembers, and he did farm work of every description, making rails and digging wells in Arkansas, and even continuing this hard labor after he came to Oklahoma in 1897. He was engaged in farming for three years near Shawnee, and then took up the real estate business. On changing his occupation he felt the need of knowledge of law, and from text books acquired a knowledge sufficient to gain him admission to the bar. He has made his practice a profitable side issue, preparing cases in not one of which he has ever been defeated in court, but has too much business in his regular line to devote himself seriously to his law practice.
     Jesse A. Marley's father was Henry M. Marley, who settled in Carroll county, Arkansas, about forty years ago, and died at Siloam Springs, Arkansas, in 1894, aged sixty-two. He was a Union soldier in the Fifth Kansas regiment of cavalry, having been a resident of Fort Scott, Kansas, when the war broke out. He was a blacksmith by trade, learned it while growing up in his native state of Indiana. He married at Fort Scott, Mary E. Allen, daughter of Jesse Allen. She now lives at Hastings with her son. Her other children were: Harvey; Florence, wife of John Gardner, of Drakes Creek, Arkansas; Maggie, wife of T. M. Faulkner, of Hastings; Lydia, wife of N. L. Bowman of Chandler, Oklahoma; George and Nora, of Hastings.Jesse A. Marley married, December 25, 1907, in Ozona, Texas, Abigail M. Pierce, daughter of J. S. Pierce, a ranchman, formerly of Pennsylvania. Mrs. Marley grew up in Crockett county, Texas, and was educated in Baylor University and in the San Antonio Female College.