Truxtun Beale

Truxtun Beale (March 6, 1856 – June 2, 1936) was an American diplomat.

Beale was born in San Francisco to Edward Fitzgerald Beale and Mary Engle Edwards; his siblings were Mary (1852–1925), who married Russian diplomat George Bakhmeteff, and Emily (1854–1912), who married John Roll McLean. He was named for his grandfather Commodore Thomas Truxtun. In 1874 he graduated from the Pennsylvania Military College, and four years later, after studying law at Columbia University, was admitted to the bar. From 1876 to 1877 Beale was secretary to his father the US Ambassador to Austria-Hungary in Vienna. Instead of practicing law, he became manager of his father's Tejon Ranch in California, where he remained for 13 years.

In 1891 he was appointed by President Harrison United States Minister to Persia, and a year later, Minister (afterward Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary) to Greece, Romania, and Serbia, making him ambassador to three countries at once. The years 1894-96 he devoted to travel in Siberia, Central Asia, and Chinese Turkestan. Many articles on international questions were contributed by him to reviews and magazines.

Upon the death of Edward Beale in 1893, Truxtun Beale inherited the Tejon Ranch. By his first wife, Harriet Blaine of Maine (the daughter of James G. Blaine), whom he married in 1894, he had a son, Walker Blaine Beale (1896 - September 18, 1918), a Lieutenant in the United States Army killed in action in France in World War I.

After divorcing Harriet, Truxtun returned to California and began a law practice. Upon the 1903 death of his mother, Beale inherited Decatur House in Washington, D.C. The same year he married his second wife, Marie Oge of San Rafael, California in New York City on April 23. The marriage took place in New York City in order to avoid what a newspaper called “notoriety due to the shooting last year in San Francisco.” The couple initially divided their time between Washington and California, but settled permanently at Decatur House following Beale’s decision in 1912 to sell Tejon Ranch to a syndicate of investors headed by Harry Chandler and Moses Sherman.

Truxtun Beale spent his last years assembling his father’s papers for an official biography and writing about foreign affairs. He died in at his country home near Annapolis, Maryland and is buried in Bruton Parish Churchyard, Williamsburg, Virginia.

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