Caroline Rose Foster
Caroline Rose Foster was an American farmer and philanthropist who managed Fosterfields, a working farm in Morristown, New Jersey, United States. Beginning in 1910 and throughout her life, Foster challenged gender roles of the Progressive Era by wearing men's clothing including men's hats, pants, shoes, and tuxedos.
Foster was a member of over 30 civic and historical organizations including the Washington Association, Washington Valley Community, Madison Historical Society, Canal Society of N.J., Morris County Golf Club, Morristown Lawn Tennis Club, the Woman's Club of Morristown, and the Morris County Historical Society. She was skilled in fishing, writing, local politics, and carpentry.
Upon her death in 1979, she donated much of her estate to the Morris County Park Commission to "preserve her beloved home and open it to visitors." She lived 99 of her 102 years on the Fosterfields property. In 2009, Foster was among 100 women honored by the National Women's History Project as "women taking the lead to save our planet".
Early life
Caroline "Cara" Rose Foster was born on April 6, 1877, in New York City to Emma Louise Thompson and Charles Grant Foster.Her mother, Emma Louise Thompson, was born in New York City in 1842. Thompson's father was James Burnet Thompson of Mendham.
Her father, Charles Grant Foster, was born in Manchester, Connecticut, in 1842.
In 1862, during the Civil War, he voluntarily enlisted in the 22nd Connecticut Infantry Regiment as a private. By 1863, he had been promoted to a sergeant major and then first lieutenant.
In 1863, Foster's father became a member of the New York Product Exchange. The same year, he began as a clerk at Ward & Co., a warehouse, grain, and commodities exchange business in Brooklyn, New York. This would later become Ward & Foster; he worked there as a commodity broker.
Emma Louise Thompson and Charles Grant Foster were wed on November 12, 1869. After they married, they lived with Charles's sister Harriet Foster and her husband John Seely Ward on Pierrepont Street in the Brooklyn Heights. Charles and Emma had two sons before Caroline: Ward and Charles Jr.. They both died in childhood, before Foster was born.
By 1878, her mother had developed tuberculosis. With her infant daughter, Emma Foster travelled to Tennessee and other Southern states with a nurse to receive medical care. However, Emma Foster died of tuberculosis in February 1880. She was buried in the family plot in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.
Move to Fosterfields
From 1878 until 1880, the Fosters rented a mansion and farm estate from General Joseph Warren Revere, a Union general of the Civil War and grandson of Paul Revere. This was possibly to stay near Morristown to provide Emma Foster with TB treatment prior to her death in 1880.In 1881, a year after Emma Foster's death, Charles G. Foster bought the Morris County farm from the family of Joseph Warren Revere. Revere had died the previous year of a heart attack. Included in the purchase was The Willows, the Gothic Revival mansion partially designed by Revere, and all of the art and furniture within. Foster renamed it Fosterfields, and from 1881 to 1915 developed it as a farm breeding Jersey cattle.
In 1882, Charles Foster travelled to the island of Jersey to buy Jersey cattle for the farm, and continued to do so with his brother in 1883. In 1884, Charles Foster travelled again to Jersey, this time bringing Caroline Foster and her aunt Carrie Thompson along.
Referring to a memory from 1883, Foster has stated:After the move, Foster's aunt, Caroline "Carrie" Thompson, joined the household to care for Foster in her youth.
From about 1880 to 1890, Foster recalled traveling to Castle Garden to hire young women as soon as they arrived from Ireland. The Fosters had as many as 3 Irish maids work and sleep in an upstairs room of The Willows.
Education
Beginning in 1886, Foster attended Miss Dana's School for Young Ladies in Morristown. According to historian Becky Hoskins, this was the best education available in Morristown. At Miss Dana's, she studied a classical curriculum, including Shakespeare, art skills, and astronomy. She engaged in school plays.In 1896, Foster graduated from Miss Dana's. Her social debut was held on April 7, 1896, at 11 pm in McAlpin Hall in Morristown, a venue that often hosted dances and entertainments at the time. 125 to 150 guests were invited.
Its refreshments were catered by the upscale Wilbur F. Day's Restaurant, Confectioner and Caterers at 40 Park Place in Morristown. Day's Restaurant was best known for its ice cream, of which Foster was a lifelong fan, as well as elaborate wedding cakes. The debut's catered menu included chicken and lobster croquettes, chicken salad, "boned turkey," Neapolitan ice cream, "ice cream fruits," Tortoni cake, Afghan biscuits, bon-bons, frappés, lemonade, and a punch bowl. Henry Giesmann's Orchestra performed at the event. In 1979, at age 101, Foster recalled that all her friends from Miss Dana's were there, and the boys were home from college for spring break; she stated, "Everyone danced with me – they had to, it was my party." She also stated that the punch was "weak." The local Morristown paper reported that dining and dancing went on until early in the morning.
The following day, her friends all signed and gifted her a "coming out fan," a decorative bamboo and paper hand fan with a golden Japanese-inspired floral pattern. Her friends wrote their signatures on the fan, congratulating Foster on her official entry into adult society. The fan is currently owned by the Morris County Park Commission and it can be viewed online.
Foster's father did not allow her to attend college. In 1975, regarding how her gender affected her opportunities, Foster has stated,Also in 1896, at the age of 19, Foster attended William McKinley's presidential inauguration in Washington D.C. and met him in a receiving line. She later recounted this experience to Pat Nixon at the Seeing Eye.
Life at Fosterfields
By the year 1900, Caroline Foster had lived on Fosterfields for 19 of her 23 years. That year, Foster joined the Morristown Lawn Tennis Club. In 1903, Foster joined the Morris County Golf Club. She was also involved in the Morristown Library's Modern Mondays, a monthly reading club that included anthropologist Ethel Cutler Freeman, author Dorothy Kunhardt, and Elinor Parker, manager of Scribner's Book Store.By 1901, Charles Foster had repeatedly referred to "Cara's garden" in his weather journal, suggesting that she had begun skilled gardening by the age of 24 years old. This may have been the same garden beside which Foster later built her Temple of Abiding Peace from 1916 to 1919.
In 1907, Foster and her father were included in a directory of prominent New York families' homes in Dau's New York Blue Book. From the 1880s to the 1920s, Morristown was a hub for millionaires to erect mansions and socialize, comparable to Rhode Island's Newport or Long Island's North Shore. She socialized with wealthy local families including the Twombleys, the Frelinghuysens, and the Moores, despite the fact that her family was not as wealthy and socially elite; they enjoyed tea parties, dog shows, dinners, and sporting events.
Around 1910, Foster first adopted masculine clothing in her daily life. In place of women's dresses customary to the era, photographs display Foster in masculine clothing including men's hats, ties, shirt, jacket, and shoes paired with a skirt. Although it was unusual for the time, her radical clothing furthered her popularity. In the 1977 Morristown Daily Record, Foster explained,
Construction of cottage
Foster was skilled in carpentry and woodworking. In 1911, she constructed chicken coops for the farm.In 1915, after the 1774 Ogden farmhouse burned down at Fosterfields, she assisted Morristown contractor George Mills in rebuilding the farmhouse based on her memories of its layout and interior.
The Temple of Abiding Peace is a cottage and garden in Fosterfields. Both of these were designed, constructed, and established by Caroline Foster.
In 1915, Foster became a member of the Garden club in Morristown.
In 1916, at the age of 39, she began to construct a one-room Cape Cod-style cottage outside of the mansion, to have a respite from the main house. Around this time, she had daily supervision of the farm employees, and her father was also losing his hearing, which biographer Becky Hoskins claims "must have been frustrating" for Foster. Foster determined to complete construction on her own. She dug the foundation by hand and built the framework herself. She gathered stones from the woods for the fireplace; sand from the nearby brook ; barn boards from lumber store C. W. Ennis; and flooring from the Thebaud house. Tools used included a hammer, a ripsaw, a crosscut saw, a ruler, a shovel, and a trowel. The cost of building was $200. Foster included the door knocker which was found in the ashes of the original 1774 Ogden house. In journals and blueprints, she referred to the cottage as "The Temple of Abiding Peace," likely as a response to the conflict of the Great War.
Of the cottage's construction, Foster recalled:Foster completed construction in 1919. Sources do not indicate whether she hired carpenters for the effort. The Temple of Abiding Peace was used as her workshop, to entertain guests, and to craft birdhouses with friends.
Historic landscape consultant Marta McDowell considers the cottage's flower garden historically significant because it "displays features that span the history of the 19th- and 20th-century American gardening: the Romantic era of the early 1800s, the Colonial Revival of 1876 onwards, and the imported English perennial borders of the early 20th century." The garden historically included lilacs, peonies, irises, phlox, and daisies, as described in Foster's diary entries and illustrated in her close friend Hattie Evans's 1920 watercolor landscape of the cottage. About a decade later, Evans created a second watercolor painting of Foster working in the garden.