Our earliest known Foster

Tracing the Origin — A Maryland Connection?

The trail to John Foster’s origins begins not with John himself, but with the woman his sister-in-law married. Marriage records place Susannah “Sukie” McElfresh wed to John Jasper Jr. in Hagerstown, Maryland. The McElfresh family — rendered variously as MacElfish and half a dozen other spellings in early documents — was well established in the western part of that state. It was this discovery that raised a question worth chasing: might John Foster, who married Sukie’s sister Mary, have come from the same country?

A visit to the Washington County Archives in 2018 turned up something tantalizing. A 1777 muster roll from Captain Jacob Sarer’s company of the Washington County Militia lists a John Foster among its men. On its own, that proves nothing — John Foster was among the most common names in colonial America. What gave it weight was finding two men named McElfresh enlisted in the same company. A John Foster standing shoulder to shoulder with McElfresh men in a Maryland militia feels considerably less like coincidence.

Washington County itself was newly formed in 1777, carved just that year out of Frederick County. To complicate matters further, this border region had previously been claimed by York County, Pennsylvania — meaning early records for the same families may be scattered across three jurisdictions in two colonies. There are several directions yet to be chased.

Whether this John Foster on the muster roll is our John Foster remains unproven. Researchers working Frederick County MD, York County PA, and early Washington County records may find the thread that connects them. We’d be glad to hear from you.

A Patriot Among Patriots

The question of whether John Foster served in South Carolina leads to a more interesting one: what kind of man was he, and what drew him into this fight?

The Washington County Militia of Maryland had a reputation more for internal politics than battlefield success. No major engagements were ever fought on Maryland soil. The militia did march to Pennsylvania and served at the Battle of Germantown in October 1777 — though the Maryland and New Jersey contingents famously arrived too late to participate in the main fighting, the fog and confusion of that dawn attack having undone Washington’s plan before they could engage. A man with that kind of service — trained, tested on a march if not in a pitched battle, and coming from a demonstrably Patriot family — might have been a genuine asset to the irregular bands operating in South Carolina’s contested backcountry.

There is a further thought worth raising. An outsider, a man without deep roots in the neighbourhood, without the tangled loyalties and old grudges that bound everyone else to someone on the other side — might such a man find it easier to fight against Tory neighbours? Might he be valuable precisely because he was free of those attachments? It may be no coincidence that a man like that rose to the rank of Lieutenant.

The late Bobby Gilmer Moss, whose <em>Roster of South Carolina Patriots in the American Revolution</em> remains an essential reference, documented John Foster’s service in considerable detail. Greg met Dr. Moss on his first trip to South Carolina in 2007, introduced by Miss Ola Jean Kelly of the Union County Museum. Militia service in South Carolina was unlike the more organized northern campaigns — terms were short, allowing citizen-soldiers to return to their farms and families between calls to duty, but the fighting when it came was intimate and brutal. Cowpens, Blackstocks, Musgrove’s Mill — these engagements happened right in the neighbourhood John Foster was now calling home.

The first land acquired by John Foster — showing provenance and witnessed by family.

The earliest South Carolina record we have of our John Foster is a lease and release land transaction, found in a book of document abstracts by Brent Holcomb — whom Greg was lucky enough to meet on his first trip to South Carolina in 2009. Holcomb’s volumes are highly recommended to any researcher working this region and period.

The record is dated May 1785 and identifies the parties as John Portman of Ninety Six District and John Foster of same. This document predates the formation of Union District and Union County; at the time, Ninety Six District encompassed almost the entire upcountry portion of South Carolina. The transaction is recorded in Sterling, reflecting that American currency was not yet in general circulation.

The parcel is described as 200 acres on both sides of Little Sandy Run (spelled “Sanday” in the original), a branch of the Pacolet River. A pioneer’s cabin is noted on the land — “Hugh Pelms cabban” as the document renders it. The land is further described as part of an original grant to John Kerconnel by the Royal Governor of the Province of North Carolina, a reminder that this border region was long considered North Carolina territory, the native Indians still attacking survey teams in the hill country making precise boundary work dangerous and disputed.

The transaction is witnessed by kinsmen: Daniel Covenhoven and Nicholas Jasper — a member of that same Jasper family mentioned throughout this story. The connection is not coincidental. This parcel is part of the larger tract that drew the Jaspers and so many connected families to this area in the first place. Robert Ivey of the Grindal Shoals Gazette has traced that story carefully: the key factor in the first removal to what later became South Carolina was John McWhorter’s marriage to Mary Jasper. After John’s father died in 1757, his mother Eleanor applied for and received a grant of 300 acres on September 26, 1766, from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina — land on both sides of the Pacolet River. Part of the Jasper family settled on Eleanor Brevard McWhorter’s land, and part on the land of John Portman Sr. and Jr. John Portman Jr. married John McWhorter Jr.’s sister Sarah. The Portman lands were also granted in the 1760s.

The land John Foster is acquiring by lease and release — a form of rent-to-own — is in all likelihood land he had already been living on as a squatter, part of this extended family group finding its footing on the Carolina frontier.

John Foster purchases 293 acres on the Pacolet from his wife's brother-in-law Nicholas Jasper — land nestled in a community of kin.

In the same years that son Jarrett (Garrett) was coming into the world, John Foster was putting down deeper roots along the Pacolet — this time buying land directly from his wife’s brother-in-law, Nicholas Jasper.

The memorandum of bargain and agreement is dated November 26, 1795, though it was not recorded until December 1805, a full decade later — a reminder that frontier families often operated on trust and handshakes long before paperwork caught up with them. By this transaction, Nicholas Jasper, now of Kentucky, sold John Foster 293 acres on the Pacolet River for $500, payable by March 10, 1800. The shift from Sterling in 1785 to dollars here reflects the new republic finding its financial footing.

The parcel sat at the heart of the family’s world. Its boundaries were drawn from a pine knot corner belonging to John Jasper Sr., ran to Charles Hames Sr.’s pine corner, followed the river to a hickory corner, and circled back past Jasper Sr.’s house — a landscape defined entirely by the names of kin and neighbours. John Foster was not buying land from a stranger. He was buying into a community.

The deed was witnessed by George Foster and Nathaniel Dabbs. George Foster personally appeared before Justice William Johnson to swear that he saw John Foster and Nicholas Jasper sign the document. Despite the shared surname, we have not been able to connect this George Foster to our family — Foster being among the most common names on the frontier, and the coincidence of the name is just that.

1790 Federal Census — John Foster & Neighbours, Union County

The 1790 census was no bureaucratic accident. It was written into the brand new Constitution of the United States — the mechanism by which the new republic would determine how many seats each state would hold in the House of Representatives. Representation by population, as opposed to the Senate’s two seats per state regardless of size. Checks and balances were the trademark of the American experiment, and this document was one of its first expressions.

The census taker would have travelled the established roads and paths of the region, recording households as he moved through the country. That sequence of names is itself a map — and reading it carefully, the flow suggests he was tracing a route along the Pacolet from west to east, then looping back.

The first familiar name is Hodge — and there is a Hodge Cemetery still standing west of the modern bridge. Then Stribling, a family that cousin Barbara Anderson noted had served with Brandon in the Revolution, and whose descendants would later marry into ours in Tennessee or Missouri. Then Gault — John’s daughter Mary would marry into that family. Then McWhorter, whose family connection had been the cause of the Jasper clan coming to South Carolina in the first place. Then Crowenhoven, a kin family. Then another McWhorter, and a couple of Maybrys — also kin, who would eventually extend John Foster a loan. Then Backster Moseley, son of James Moseley. Then John Henderson, a man of means (twenty slaves) whose family would be instrumental in the early development of Kentucky. Then John Jasper, whose land adjoined John Foster’s — and then John himself.

John Foster’s household in 1790 is recorded as:

• 1 free white male aged 16 and upward
• 3 free white males under 16
• 6 free white females
• 0 other free persons
• 0 slaves

One adult man, three boys, six women and girls, and no enslaved people. A snapshot of a household in full motion — sons still young, daughters numerous, and a family building its place in a new country without the labour of the enslaved.

Continuing along what was likely a westward return loop, the census taker records more kin and neighbours: James Moseley, then John and William Hames, another McWhorter, a couple of Bobos — who would become a kin family in a later generation — some Colemans, another Hames, John Jasper again, then the Fowlers, also kin in time, more McWhorters, and finally Nicholas Jasper — who must have maintained property in Union County even while living in Kentucky. By that point the route had likely carried the census taker all the way along what is now Tump Smith Road and into the Pea Ridge district.

It is a neighbourhood frozen in a single year — and almost every name on the page connects to John Foster’s story in some way.

1800 United States Census — Union County, South Carolina

Ten years on from the first Federal Census, Union County had grown dramatically. The 1800 count recorded 10,237 souls — a jump of roughly 33% from 1790. For every one neighbour John Foster had known in that first enumeration, there were now closer to three. The frontier was filling in.

The familiar names are still there. The Hames family — William, John, Charles — remain John’s closest neighbours on the page, as they were on the ground. The Jaspers, the Fowlers, the McWhorters, the Moseleys, the Crownovers — the community that had coalesced along the Pacolet in the 1780s was holding together even as new households pressed in around them.

Some of those new arrivals are worth pausing on. James Pickens appears in the neighbourhood, and the name matters: two of John Foster’s sons would marry Pickens girls, and an elderly James Moseley would do the same. The Pickens family was putting down roots right alongside them.

Then there are the Prigmores. Two households — Theodorus and John Prigmore — appear on the very same page as John Foster himself. The name surfaces again 160 years later, when Andrew J. Foster, describing his family’s move from pro-Confederate Jasper County, Missouri to pro-Union Bourbon County, Kansas, mentions that they stopped and stayed with “uncle Johnny Prigmore.” A coincidence? Possibly. But in a world where family groups travelled together, settled together, and kept track of one another across decades and states, it is the kind of coincidence worth noting.

There is also another John Foster recorded within three pages — and a George and a Kenny Foster elsewhere in the county. No connection to our family has been established. Foster was a common name, and the frontier was not short of them.

Also worth noting: Daniel Fitch appears nearby, his wife being Maisie Fitch — sister of Mary Foster and Susannah Jasper, tightening the web of McElfresh connections still further.

John Foster’s own household in 1800 is recorded as follows:

Free Males

• Under 10 years: 2
• 10–15 years: 2
• 16–25 years: 1
• 26–44 years: 0
• 45 years and older: 1

Free Females

• Under 10 years: 1
• 10–15 years: 1
• 16–25 years: 1
• 26–44 years: 1
• 45 years and older: 0

Slaves: 0

The household tells a story of its own. John himself is the one man over 45. There is no male in the 26–44 bracket — the sons are still young. One young man of 16–25 is likely the eldest son approaching adulthood. Mary, in the 26–44 bracket, is present and accounted for. And still no enslaved people — consistent with 1790, and consistent with the character of this family throughout their time in South Carolina.

1803 — John Foster Sells First Farm to Maybry

Eighteen years after that first tentative lease and release from John Portman, John Foster sold the original farm. The buyer was James Maybry — a neighbour whose family had appeared in the same census pages, and who would later extend the Fosters financial credit as well. This was not a transaction between strangers. It was a deal between men who knew each other well, on land both of them knew intimately.

The price was $1,200 — nearly two and a half times what John had paid Nicholas Jasper for the adjoining parcel in 1795, and a considerable sum for the time. The original 200 acres on both sides of Sandy Run, the land that had begun as a squat and became a farm, was changing hands.

The document itself is a curious one, and worth a moment’s reflection. It is structured not as a straightforward deed of sale but as a bond — John Foster binding himself, his heirs, executors, and administrators in the sum of $1,200, with the obligation voided only upon delivery of good and lawful title on or before December 25, 1803. In other words, it reads as though Maybry paid first, and Foster then had nine days to produce the paperwork.

Why structure it this way? One possibility is that the money changed hands on the 16th and the formal deed transfer was completed by Christmas. Another is that this was simply the legal form available to them — a bond of obligation used in place of a simultaneous exchange. Frontier courthouses ran on their own rhythms, and the document was not even recorded until August 1805, nearly two years after it was signed. Whatever the mechanics, it was witnessed by Jesse Maybry and John Long alongside James Maybry himself — the buyer standing as his own witness, a reminder that legal formality on the Carolina frontier was a practical affair rather than a strict one.

What John Foster did with $1,200 and why he chose this moment to sell the first farm are questions the record does not answer directly. But the timing is suggestive. By 1803 sons were growing up and starting families of their own. It is possible John was thinking practically — consolidating, repositioning, perhaps looking for land to set his boys up on as they came of age. He could not have known that for at least a couple of them, the future lay not along the Pacolet but in Tennessee. For now, the original Foster farm passed out of the family in the closing days of 1803, and whatever John had in mind next, he had $1,200 to work with.

1810 Federal Census — Union County, South Carolina

By 1810 the world along the Pacolet had settled into something more permanent. The frontier scramble of the 1780s was a generation behind them. The men who had squatted, fought, and scratched out farms in the backcountry were now ageing patriarchs, and their sons were appearing in the census in their own right.

That shift is visible in these pages. John Foster himself appears — but so does Jeremiah Foster, believed to be his eldest son, now heading his own household. And John M. Foster, another son, appears as well, recorded nearby among the Hames families that had always been the closest neighbours. The Foster name was multiplying on the Pacolet, which makes the census both more rewarding and more demanding to read.

Page 3 presents a particular puzzle. Our John Foster is there, and one of the other John Fosters on the same page is almost certainly John M., the son. But a third Foster entry on that page has not yet been conclusively identified. It may be a cousin, a more distant relation, or simply another family of the same common name that had drifted into the neighbourhood. This is an open research question and anyone who has worked these Union County records is welcome to make contact.

The surrounding names tell the story of a community that had largely held together across thirty years. The Hames families — William, Thomas, Eligible, John, Hannah — remain as tightly woven into the fabric of the neighbourhood as ever. The Mosleys are there, Baxter and James both. The Crownovers, the Gaults, the Fowlers in force — Jasper, Israel, Coleman, John, Womack. The Maybrys, Jesse and Benjamin, the same family that bought John’s first farm in 1803. John Pridmore, whose name will echo decades later when Andrew J. Foster mentions staying with uncle Johnny Prigmore on the road to Kansas.

Martha Pickens appears on Page 1 — a name to note, as two of John Foster’s sons would marry into the Pickens family. And Thomas Seely is recorded on Page 2, with a note that the Seely family would later marry into the Fosters in Tennessee — a thread not yet pulled but worth keeping.

The household numbers for our John Foster are recorded in the images on file. What the census cannot show is what John knew and didn’t know in 1810 — that the community he had spent twenty-five years building along the Pacolet would not hold his family together much longer. Tennessee was already pulling at some of his children. The great dispersal was coming, even if it wasn’t visible yet in the neat columns of the census taker’s book.

1820 Federal Census — Union County, South Carolina

John Foster Sr. in his final census on the Pacolet — sons established on their own land, a daughter-in-law widowed by war, and a neighbourhood that has known this family for thirty-five years.

The 1820 census is the last in which John Foster Sr. appears on the Pacolet. He would have been in his sixties at minimum — possibly older, depending on when exactly he was born — and the world recorded in these two pages is one he had spent the better part of his adult life building.

The most striking thing about this census, read against the ones before it, is how thoroughly the Foster name had taken root. John Sr. is on Page 2, among the oldest and most familiar names on the river — Godfrey Fowler, Charles Hames Sr., James Moseley Sr. But on Page 1, further along what is now Tump Smith Road toward the community then known as Rea Ridge, John M. Foster appears in his own right, his farm by this point well enough established that a Moseley wedding would later be held there. And on Page 2, right beside his father, Frederick Foster — another son, another household, another branch of the family putting down roots within sight of the original farm.

Then there is Patsey Foster. She appears on Page 1, near John M., recorded as a household head in her own right. Patsey was the widow of Jeremiah Foster — believed to be John Sr.’s eldest son — who died in service during the War of 1812. He was not killed in battle. Jeremiah, along with his brother Frederick and three Fowler neighbours whose names appear on these same census pages — Womack, Mark, and Godfrey — had garrisoned Charleston. No shots were fired, but disease moved through the ranks as it invariably did, and it was disease that took Jeremiah. Patsey was left to head her own household, recorded here among the same neighbours who had known her husband.

The surrounding names are by now deeply familiar. The Hames families — William B., William S., Mark, Charles Sr. — have never left. The Fowlers are present in force: Godfrey, James, Coleman, Martin, Mark Sr. and Jr., Fanny, Willis, Ellis, Jasper, Womack. The Crownovers, Daniel Sr. and Jr. The McWhirters. The Moseleys in several households — James Sr., John, Jane. Martha Pickens, widowed and heading her own household, the matriarch of the family whose daughters would marry two of John’s sons and whose orbit had overlapped with the Fosters for decades.

This is what thirty-five years of community looks like on paper. The same families, the same river, the same roads — but a generation deeper, with children grown and grandchildren beginning to appear in the columns.

What happened to John Foster Sr. after 1820 is not yet fully resolved by the documentary record. He does not appear in the 1830 census, which suggests he had died in the intervening decade. His children, meanwhile, were already beginning the migrations that would carry the Foster name to Tennessee, to Missouri, and eventually to Kansas. The world they built along the Pacolet would not hold them forever — but John had held it together longer than most.

1829 — John Foster Gifts Land to Son Thomas

Once a soldier, a farmer, and now a distiller — John Foster puts his affairs in order, deeding land to a son and settling accounts with a life well lived on Sandy Run in the shadow of Grindal Shoals.

This document gives us something no other record has: a trade. For the first time, John Foster is identified by occupation. He is a distiller — a stiller, in the language of the document. It is a small word that opens a window. A man who ran a still was not merely feeding his family. He was processing grain into a commodity, serving a neighbourhood, operating a small rural enterprise. It fits the picture of a man who had been acquiring land, selling land, and managing transactions for forty years on the Pacolet.

By 1829 John Foster was old enough to be thinking carefully about what he would leave behind and to whom. This deed is his answer for his son Thomas. Seventy acres, adjoining the lands of Baxter Moseley and James Moseley, given freely “for and in consideration of the natural love and affection which I have to my son Thomas Foster.” The land does not transfer immediately. John adds a telling line at the close: the above obligation of gift to be good at my death. He is keeping the use of the land for whatever time remains to him, while ensuring Thomas’s claim is legally secured. A life estate in everything but name.

The seventy acres sit in good company. The Moseley family had been neighbours since the first census, their lands running alongside the Foster holdings for decades. James Moseley in particular was a man of considerable local standing — scout, blacksmith, fighter, a childhood friend of Daniel Boone whose legend in Union County would long outlast him. To be tucked in beside the Moseley lands was to be in the heart of the neighbourhood John Foster had spent his life building. That Thomas received this parcel specifically, and that he would later sell it to a Gault — a family almost certainly bound to the Fosters by marriage — suggests these seventy acres stayed in the extended family orbit long after John was gone.

The deed is witnessed by Dawson Gault and James P. Foster — between them a neat summary of how tightly this world had drawn together. The Gaults had been neighbours since the beginning, the two families almost certainly bound by marriage by this point, their orbit overlapping with the Whites and McWhirters who were also connected to the Fosters by blood or alliance. James P. Foster is a grandson — son of John M. Foster — present at his grandfather’s side. Three generations of a family, and a Gault, gathered around a document on Sandy Run.

By June 1829 John Foster was old enough to be thinking carefully about what he would leave behind. He signed this deed with a seal, not a mark. Whatever else the years had taken, his hand was still steady.

1830 Federal Census — Union County, South Carolina

John Foster, between 80 and 90 years old, still on Sandy Run — Mary beside him, Frederick nearby.

The 1830 census finds John Foster still here. The age columns place him between 80 and 90, putting his birth somewhere in the 1740s — the most precise estimate the records allow. Beside him is one woman in the 70 to 80 column, almost certainly Mary. They are old together on Sandy Run, still recorded as a household, still among the same families that have surrounded them for forty years.

Frederick Foster appears immediately below him on the page. The Mosleys, Fowlers, Hames, and Gaults are all present. The neighbourhood has held.

John would be dead before the next census. But in 1830 he was still there.

1831 — Will of John Foster

A man of sound mind and weak body settles his affairs — land for grandchildren, personal property for the women, and a name honoured one last time.

John Foster signed his will on August 10, 1831, describing himself as of sound and disposing mind and memory, but weak in body. He was somewhere in his eighties. The document is brief and careful, and it tells us more about this family than almost anything that came before it.

Mary comes first. All personal property goes to her for the duration of her life — and after her death, to be equally divided among the children, explicitly excluding Frederick, John, Jared, and Thomas. The sons had already received their portions in land. What remained of the household goods, the tools, the chattels of a long life on Sandy Run, would go to the daughters — women whose names the records have not yet given us, but whose place in their father’s affections is clear enough.

The land is divided three ways. Thomas already holds his seventy acres by deed — the old house, the land running across the big road, deducted before the division begins. What remains is split equally: one third to the children of John, one third to the children of Jared, and one third to Jeremiah — not to Frederick, but specifically to Jeremiah, Frederick’s son, to include the premises where his father now lives.

Why Jeremiah? Frederick is alive and present in 1831, yet it is his son, not he, who receives the bequest directly. One reading is practical — perhaps Frederick had already received provision elsewhere. But there is another possibility worth sitting with. Frederick had named his son Jeremiah after his brother who died garrisoning Charleston in the War of 1812 — the beloved eldest son, taken not by battle but by disease. That name was a tribute. And John Foster, in his last document, may have been honouring that tribute in return — making sure the boy who carried his dead son’s name would have land to stand on.

The will also tells us the family was already in motion. Jared’s share goes not to Jared but to his children — suggesting he was already gone, or going, toward Tennessee with Dorcas Moseley. There is drama in that story that deserves its own telling, and it will get it on the Dorcas Moseley page.

Frederick and young Jeremiah would follow to Tennessee as well. Before the next census, Frederick, Jeremiah, and Jared and his sons would all be gone from Union County. Only John M. and his family would remain on Sandy Run — and their descendants are there still.

James Moseley witnessed the will. The old neighbour, scout, blacksmith, childhood friend of Daniel Boone — there at the end, setting his name to the last document of a man he had known for the better part of fifty years.

The will was taken down by J. S. Sims, a lawyer whose family was rooted at Grindal Shoals — the same crossing that had defined this neighbourhood since before John Foster arrived. Sims would go on to considerable prominence in South Carolina public life. Thirty years after recording the quiet last wishes of an old man on Sandy Run, he put his name to the Ordinance of Secession, taking South Carolina out of the United States in December 1861 and setting the Civil War in motion. It is a long distance from a farmhouse on Sandy Run to that moment in history — but the same hand connected them.

John Foster had come to Sandy Run as a squatter with nothing recorded to his name. He left a will dividing land among three branches of his family, with his wife provided for and his daughters remembered. Not a bad accounting for a life.