Marie Bloede (Blöde), 1823-1870

Marie Bloede (29 September 1821 – 12 March 1870) was an American author of German descent; her pseudonym was Marie Westland. She was born Marie Antoinette Franziska Jungnitz in Wrocław (then Breslau), Silesia, to Johanna Maria Friederike Jungnitz (née Schmieder) and Karl Ferdinand Jungnitz (a Justice of the Supreme Court of Silesia).

Around 1844, she married Gustavus “Gustav” Bloede (Blöde) (1814 – 1888). Gustav became a liberal member of the city council of Dresden during the revolution of 1848. He fled Dresden to avoid arrest, and made his way to Brussels. The family (Marie, Gustav, and their three children, Gertrude, Kate and Victor) reunited and sailed from Antwerp on 14 July 1850, aboard the Julia Howard, arriving in New York on 21 August 1850.

Marie taught piano, wrote music, and produced poems, stories, and translations in both German and English. The Bloede home was literate and cultured, and known for a period as a salon.

Marie died in Brooklyn, New York, of tuberculosis. Gustav died in Catonsville, Maryland.

Gustav and Marie Bloede’s children included the poet Gertrude Bloede (1845–1905); Kate (1848–1891), who married the American artist, naturalist, and teacher Abbott Handerson Thayer; and Indiana “Indie” (1854–1936), who married Samuel Thomas King, a New York City area physician and surgeon. Gustav and Marie’s son was the chemist and businessman Victor Gustav Bloede (1849–1937). Victor established himself in Baltimore, obtaining many patents for improving chemical production, notably in the dyeing of cotton fabrics. Victor was a major supporter of the Maryland Hospital for Consumptives, later called the Eudowood Sanitarium in Towson, to which he contributed money for the construction of clinic buildings as a memorial to his mother who had died from tuberculosis. [National Cyclopedia of American Biography, c. 1900]