Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Bleecker, Ann Eliza

BLEECKER, Ann Eliza, poet, b. in New York city in October, 1752; d. in Tomhannock, near Albany, N. Y., 23 Nov., 1783. She was the youngest daughter of Brandt Schuyler, of New York, and passed her early life in that city. In 1769 she married John J. Bleecker, of New Rochelle, and, after a year's residence in Poughkeepsie, settled in Tomhannock. Here her life was very happy until the arrival of Burgoyne's army in 1777, when she fled with her young children under conditions of great suffering, reaching Albany at first, and then Red Hook, where she remained until after the surrender of Burgoyne. Soon after returning to her home at Tomhannock she was taken sick and died. Her poems, devoted principally to domestic topics, were rather melancholy, and were written as the occasion suggested, without any intention of publication. A number of these, however, appeared in the "New York Magazine." Some years after her death her stories and poems were collected and published under the title of "Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker in Prose and Verse," with a memoir by her daughter, Margaretta V. Faugeres (new ed., New York, 1809).