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Death Valley Days with General Beale (and Truxtun)
Truxtun’s father, General Edward Fitzgerald Beale, was a hero of the old west. His career started out in the Navy, but he ended up as a general in the California Militia. The 1950s TV show, Death Valley Days, has two episodes that feature Beale. The first, Gold Rush in Reverse, is about him bringing news …
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The sordid history of Grover Cleveland and the Baby Ruth candy bar.
Grover Cleveland’s name has popped up on these pages, so I thought I would share some interesting stories about him. From New York State, Cleveland was the first Democrat and first man who had not served in the military to get elected president since the Civil War. He was also the first president to serve …
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Bar Harbor, Maine, 1889
A purpose of this blog is to give me a space to write about topics that are not in my book (still in the works) but are related to it. There are many interesting stories about the families involved in late 19th-century American politics. I previously posted a copy of this photo from the Maine …
The Russian “Flu” and the Blaine Family
We aren’t experiencing anything new with the coronavirus pandemic. It’s happened before. Most don’t realize it or how much better off we still are from people who lived in the past. Take, for example, the Russian “Flu”, then commonly called La Grippe, which swept the world starting in 1889. Last year, Bloomberg Opinion write, Mark …
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Catrina Beale in 1970
Catrina Beale was Truxtun’s cousin. Born in 1900, she was the only child of John Forbes Beale, a Washington D.C. attorney, and Catharine Beale. John Beale died in 1923 and Catharine died in 1931. Then unmarried, she lived with Truxtun and Marie. They might have looked at her as a daughter, as she was close …
Marie Beale would have loved Trump’s Executive Order on architecture
On December 21, 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture. In it, he wrote about the importance of architecture and complained about the modern Brutalist design of so many federal buildings. He called for more architecture with classical designs, which he defined as: the architectural tradition derived from the …
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Christmas at Decatur House
General Edward Fitzgerald Beale bought Decatur House, an historic home in Washington, D.C. near the White House, just after the Civil War. He and his family entertained people there for years, just as his daughter-in-law Marie would for many years after. A favorite time of year was Christmas. Gerald Eugene Thompson in his dissertation titled …
Bruton Parish Episcopal Church
Truxtun and Marie Beale’s cremated remains are interred at Bruton Parish Episcopal Church in Williamsburg, Virginia. Since neither of them was a member of the church, nor active in the Episcopal Church, this might seem odd. Neither of them was from Williamsburg either, nor known to spend much time in the area. Although nominally Beale …
Help needed
I wrote this book. Rewrote it. Then edited it many times. I still find occasional typos or things that could be worded better. Right now, there is no publisher behind this book. That might change. Or I might self-publish. I believe that is going to be the future of much publishing and has many advantages …