Fosterfields 1854
Morris Township, Morris County, New Jersey
Marker Inscription
New Gothic house built by General Joseph revere, grandson of Paul revere. Purchased 1881 by Charles Foster, whose daughter, Caroline, donated the property as living form to Morris County Park commission in 1973.
The Story
This Gothic Revival house was built in 1854 by General Joseph Warren Revere, a career military and naval officer and grandson of the Revolutionary patriot Paul Revere. In 1881 it was purchased by Charles Foster, and his daughter Caroline kept the property as a working farm through much of the twentieth century. In 1973 she donated it to the Morris County Park Commission, and it endures today as a living historical farm.
Why it matters
Fosterfields links a famous Revolutionary-era family name to a rare surviving gentleman's farm, now preserved so visitors can experience rural life of a century ago.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The middle of the nineteenth century was a romantic age in American building. Fashionable taste had turned away from strict classical symmetry toward the picturesque — steep gables, pointed windows, and irregular silhouettes borrowed from medieval Europe. The Gothic Revival brought a storybook quality to the American countryside, and Morris County, New Jersey, with its wooded hills within reach of New York, was fertile ground for such houses.
When this home was built in 1854, the county was a settled landscape of farms and estates, prosperous and green. A gentleman's country place here was both a working property and a retreat, expressing its owner's standing while keeping a foot in the soil.
The house you see reflects that world — a substantial Gothic Revival home built in an era of confidence and rising fortune, decades before the great industrial estates that would later crowd the region. It carries the flavor of the Early Republic maturing into the Gilded Age.
People & events
The house was built by General Joseph Warren Revere, a man who carried one of the most famous names in American history. He was a grandson of Paul Revere, the Boston patriot whose midnight ride became legend — and Joseph made a notable career of his own as a military and naval officer before settling into life as a country gentleman here.
In 1881 the property passed to Charles Foster, and it is from his family that the place takes its enduring identity. Foster's daughter, Caroline, would become its steward for the long stretch of the twentieth century, keeping it as a working farm across decades of enormous change in American life.
Caroline Foster's final act of stewardship shaped what the site is today. In 1973 she donated the property to the Morris County Park Commission, ensuring that it would be preserved rather than sold off or subdivided — a gift that turned a private family farm into a public inheritance.
Its place in the American story
Fosterfields joins two threads of the American story in a single place. One is the legacy of the Revolutionary generation, carried here through the Revere name into the nineteenth century — a reminder of how the founding families' descendants went on to lead lives of their own across the growing nation.
The other is the survival of the working farm. As America urbanized and countryside gave way to suburb, farms like this one grew rare. Caroline Foster's decision to preserve hers, and then to give it to the public, saved a way of life that might otherwise have vanished under new development.
Today the property endures as a living historical farm, where the rhythms of rural life from around a century ago are kept alive. That makes it more than a handsome old house; it is a window onto how ordinary agricultural work was actually done, preserved for people who will never otherwise see it.
If you visit
This is the rare marker that invites you in. Because Caroline Foster gave the property to the county as a public trust, it lives on as a working historical farm — so come ready to see rural life demonstrated rather than merely described.
Look first at the house itself, and let its Gothic Revival lines register: the pointed accents and picturesque roofline that marked it as fashionable in the 1850s. Then let your attention move outward to the fields and farm buildings, where the real story of the place unfolds in barns, animals, and the honest labor of an earlier century.
It makes an easy and rewarding stop on a day exploring Morris County's parks and historic sites. Bring curiosity and a little patience — a farm keeps a slower clock than a museum — and you'll come away with a vivid sense of how people lived and worked on this land, and of the family whose care carried it all the way to you.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · General Joseph Warren Revere
- · Paul Revere
- · Charles Foster
- · Caroline Foster
Themes & tags
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