Biography

Wife of General A.J. Alexander. The daughter of a prominent New York family, Eveline "Evy" Alexander was the fourth of eleven children born to Enos T. Martin, a successful attorney and journalist, and the former Cornelia Williams, a mercantile heiress from Utica. She spent her girlhood in the stimulating atmosphere of "Willowbrook", the Throop-Martin estate on Auburn's Lake Owasco, where her parents and grand-uncle, former New York Governor Enos Thompson Throop, regularly hosted famous visitors. During the 1860's Evy herself introduced two of these notables to her family circle: Civil war hero Emory Upton, who later married her sister Emily, and Myles Keogh, often remembered for his death at the Little Big Horn in 1876. Vivacious and gifted with the Martin literary talent (her younger brother was the noted writer Edward S. Martin), Evy had married Union cavalry officer Andrew J. Alexander at the Sand Beach Church near Willowbrook on November 3, 1864, and after the Civil War, she accompanied her husband to his various commands in the frontier army. Her letters and account of life as a military wife in the Southwest Indian territories, published under the title "Cavalry Wife: the Diary of Eveline M. Alexander", have proven to be a treasure trove for scholars. Although happily married, Evy and General Alexander suffered the loss of four of their five children before they had grown to adulthood. Widowed in 1887 when her ailing, 53-year-old husband died in her arms on the train home to Auburn, Evy also outlived their sole surviving child, son Upton Alexander, who died at age 35 in 1910. Described by a young relative as having "a sad, commanding demeanor" in her later years, she lived on at Willowbrook with her siblings Nellie and George. In 1922 she died there at age 79, and was laid to rest between General Alexander and the son she'd buried a dozen years earlier. Her epitaph reads: "IN THY PRESENCE IS FULLNESS OF JOY". She was survived by three of her eleven siblings: elder sister Nellie Martin, younger brothers George and Edward, and a number of nieces and nephews.