TRAVIS JACOBS

JACOBS--Travis Beal, age 89, died at his home in Bridport, VT, on September 16, 2025, surrounded by his loved ones. He was born in New York City on April 22, 1936, the son of Albert C. and Loretta Beal Jacobs. His father was a Professor of Law at Columbia University and Provost under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As a teenager Travis loved taking the subway up to the Polo Grounds for New York Giants games, especially when they played to Brooklyn Dodgers with Jackie Robinson. In 1953 Travis attended Deerfield Academy and Princeton University '58. Initially, he planned to attend Columbia Law School but, at the last minute, he pursued a Ph.D. in American History at Columbia under William E. Leuchtenburg. In 1965 he joined the history faculty at Middlebury College and served as Department Chair for seventeen years. A College Review Committee asserted: "He was one of the first department chairs to embrace the College's aspirations in minority recruiting, and he is certainly the most conspicuously successful." His publications include America and the Russo-Finnish Winter War, 1939-1940; co-editing Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971, the Diaries of Adolf A. Berle, a FDR Brain Truster; Eisenhower at Columba; and Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Founding of the American Assembly. He edited the Middlebury College General Catalogue: Bicentennial Edition, 2000, a Who Was Who and Who's Who of the College. He received several Earhart Foundation Fellowships; taught in Tunis and Mainz on Fulbright; served on the Presidential Studies Quarterly Editorial Board; and attended many Salzburg Seminars on American Studies. He was president of the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury during the capital campaign that established the Paris Fletcher Community Center, and the J. Robert Maguire Fund research center. He retired as Fletcher D. Proctor Emeritus of American History in 2008. In 1954 his mother purchased from Mrs. Electus Litchfield Green Pastures property on Chappaquiddick Island, Edgartown, MA, with its Stanford White house on Katama Bay with some 90 acres. The house had been closed for four years, and Travis would spend parts of the summers working on the house and clearing the overgrown brush on the property, opening up some lovely water views. In the 1970's he and his mother decided the only way they could preserve the beautiful property would be with a limited development with some common land. After a series of struggles, they established the Green Pastures Association in 1982. From 1983 to 1986 he had served as President of the Chappaquiddick Island Association. As much as he loved Green Pastures and Chappy, the traveling distance became too much and he sold it in 2020 . During the past decade Travis spent time throughout the year at Chazy Lake in the Adirondacks. He leaves unfinished a study of the late Vermonter Robert T. Stafford, former Governor, U.S. Congressman, and U. S. Senator.. Besides his parents, he was predeceased by his older sisters Loretta J. Edwards and Sarah J. Edwards, and Lulu M. Lindemann, a dear family companion for nearly seventy years, and two former wives, Judith A. Hasselbrack and Eleanor T. Morison, the mother of his sons T. Beal Jacobs, Jr., and Holmes M. Jacobs who own Two Brothers Tavern in Middlebury. Besides his sons, he is survived by three grandchildren, Jackson, Piper and Sally Jacobs, and longtime friend and traveling companion, Constance Carroll. A Memorial Service will be held at Saint Stephen's Episcopal Church in Middlebury, Vermont.