First wife of Congressional Medal of Honor recipient General Wilber E. Wilder.
The daughter of a prominent New York family, and sister of the noted writer Edward S. Martin, Violet Martin Wilder was the youngest of the eleven children of Enos T. Martin, a successful attorney and journalist, and the former Cornelia Williams, a mercantile heiress. She was born the year before the outbreak of the American Civil War at "Willowbrook", the Throop-Martin estate on Auburn's Lake Owasco, and raised in its stimulating atmosphere, as her parents and grand-uncle, former New York Governor Enos Thompson Throop, regularly hosted famous visitors from all walks of life there. Like three of her sisters before her, Violet's name was destined to be linked with that of a distinguished soldier, and in the late 1870's she became the bride of West Point graduate Wilber Elliot Wilder, a young cavalry officer in the frontier army who would soon be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism during the Indian Wars. A devoted military wife, she saw her husband rise to the rank of colonel. Mrs. Wilder was 59 years old when she died at Willowbrook in 1919, after a long illness. Predeceased by her parents and six of her eleven siblings, her survivors included her husband, their sons Throop and Wilber, daughters Sylvia, Cornelia, and Violet, her brothers George and Edward Martin, and her sisters Cornelia Martin and Evelina Alexander. General Wilder, who was still on active duty at the time of her death, would survive two later wives: the widowed Rose Grosvenor who died just two years after their 1921 marriage, and Laura Merritt, widow of Civil War hero Gen. Wesley Merritt, who died in 1951. The long-lived cavalryman, who was 95 when he died the following year, was buried in Ridgefield, Connecticut. His second and third marriages were childless, but three of his adult children from his first marriage are buried here in Fort Hill Cemetery with their mother. BIO & GRAVE PHOTO: Nikita Barlow