page_title: Edward Fitzgerald Beale
section_title: Retirement
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Fitzgerald Beale / Retirement
caption_attribution_description: English: Edward Fitzgerald Beale gravestone in Chester Rural Cemetery. Photo taken March 2020.
context_page_description: Edward Fitzgerald "Ned" Beale was a national figure in the 19th century United States. He was a naval officer, military general, explorer, frontiersman, Indian affairs superintendent, California rancher, diplomat, and friend of Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill Cody and Ulysses S. Grant. He fought in the Mexican–American War, emerging as a hero of the Battle of San Pasqual in 1846. He achieved national fame in 1848 in carrying to the east the first gold samples from California, contributing to the gold rush.
  In the late 1850s, Beale surveyed and built Beale's Wagon Road, which many settlers used to move to the West, and which became part of Route 66 and the route for the Transcontinental railroad. As California's first Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Beale helped charter a humanitarian policy towards Native Americans in the 1850s. He also founded the Tejon Ranch, the largest private landholding in California, and became a millionaire several times over. He received appointments from five U.S.
context_section_description: In his retirement, Beale lived at Decatur House in Washington, D.C., with yearly visits to Tejon Ranch and more frequent visits to his horse farm at Ash Hill in Hyattsville, northeast of Washington, D.C. At Ash Hill he entertained friends such as Grant, who kept two Arabian horses stabled there, President Grover Cleveland and Buffalo Bill Cody. Ash Hill was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.
  Beale died at Decatur House in 1893 and is interred at Chester Rural Cemetery in Chester, Pennsylvania. His will was witnessed by Ulysses S. Grant and General William Tecumseh Sherman.
caption: Edward Fitzgerald Beale gravestone in Chester Rural Cemetery
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