Amasa Leland Stanford was an American attorney, industrialist, philanthropist, and Republican Party politician from California. He served as the 8th Governor of California from 1862 to 1863 and represented the state in the United States Senate from 1885 until his death in 1893. He and his wife Jane founded Stanford University, named after their late son.

Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford was an American philanthropist and co-founder of Stanford University in 1885, along with her husband, Leland Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid fever at age 15 in 1884. After her husband's death in 1893, she funded and operated the university almost single-handedly until her unsolved murder by strychnine poisoning in 1905.