John Foster
Richmond, Fort Bend County, Texas
Marker Inscription
John Foster John Foster was born on May 25, 1757, in South Carolina to William James and Mary (Hill) Foster. Family history indicates he may have served with his brothers in Charleston against a British attack in June 1776. He married Rachel (Gibson), and they had at least six children, four of whom eventually lived in Texas. About 1781, the Fosters crossed the Appalachians and traveled almost 2,000 miles by flatboat to the Spanish-occupied Natchez District of present-day Mississippi. There, Foster became a substantial landowner and cattleman. After Rachel died, he married Mary (Smith) Kelsey, and of their seven children, three would come to Texas. After Mississippi Territory was created in 1798, Foster opposed the decrees of the appointed governor and petitioned Congress for an elected legislature. He established the town of Washington, and after it became the territorial capital in 1802, helped found Jefferson College. In 1822, Foster joined his son Randolph in Texas and became one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists. In 1824, he received an 11,600-acre grant in what is now Fort Bend County. He is believed to have established a school on his property that eventually became the Foster Community School. On December 25, 1835, John Foster signed the Columbia Resolutions urging Texas' declaration of independence from Mexico. Leaving behind four sons to support the struggle for Texas independence, Foster went to Wilkinson County, Mississippi, in early 1836 to live in retirement at the home of one of his daughters. He died there on January 26, 1837. (2002)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Born in South Carolina in 1757, John Foster pushed west across the Appalachians around 1781 to the Spanish-held Natchez District, where he became a landowner, founded the town of Washington, and helped establish Jefferson College. In 1822 he joined the Texas frontier as one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred," receiving an 11,600-acre grant in what is now Fort Bend County. On Christmas Day 1835 he signed the Columbia Resolutions urging Texas independence, then retired to Mississippi, where he died in 1837.
Why it matters
Foster embodies the restless Anglo-American migration that carried the frontier from the Carolinas to Spanish Texas, and his place among Austin's first colonists ties one family to the founding of Anglo Texas.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John Foster
- · Stephen F. Austin
Related events
- · Austin's Old Three Hundred colony
- · Texas Revolution
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Rev. William M. Tryon
Houston, TX
William Milton Tryon, a New Yorker licensed to preach in Georgia and ordained in Alabama, volunteered in 1841 to serve Texas as a missionary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Riding the circuit of southeast Texas, he revived congregations, helped organize the state's Baptist associations, and—with Robert E. B. Baylor—drafted the charter for the college that became Baylor University, serving as the first president of its board of trustees. In 1845 he became the resident pastor of Houston's First Baptist Church, raising the money for its first brick building before dying of yellow fever in 1847.
Foster Community
Rosenberg, TX
The Foster community traces to 1821, when Randolph Foster pitched a permanent camp on an enormous land grant tied to his father John, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists. Foster kin fought in the Texas War for Independence, and the settlement thrived on sugar cane in the 1840s, later shipping its crop by a railroad Imperial Sugar built to the mills at Sugar Land. Schools, a store, and a post office followed, but by the end of World War II the failing sugar crop, the Depression, and shifting ownership drained the community away.
Jane Long Boarding House
Richmond, TX
Jane Wilkinson Long earned the name "Mother of Texas" through the winter of 1821, when—stranded at Point Bolivar with her small daughter and an enslaved girl named Kian while her husband's filibustering expedition marched into Mexico—she gave birth in a snowstorm and then rose to gather food and firewood for her family. In the decades that followed she ran two of the most famous boarding houses of the colonial and republic eras, hosting William B. Travis, Sam Houston, and Mirabeau B. Lamar. On this Richmond site she opened a house in 1837 that became a hub of Texas social and political life until her plantation prospered in the 1840s.
Randon & Pennington Grant of 1824
Fulshear, TX
When Stephen F. Austin won a Mexican permit to settle 300 families in Texas, he and Baron de Bastrop issued 272 land grants between 1823 and 1824, many along the Brazos and San Bernard rivers. In August 1824 David Randon—an Alabama native of part-Creek descent—and his partner Isaac Pennington received 4,428 fertile acres on the Brazos, prized for river access to markets. Randon grew into one of the colony's most successful planters, while Pennington, one of the colony's earliest teachers, sold out his share and later carried the mail on a Texas post route.