The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
"Father" of the Fort Wayne park system; Foster Brothers; donor of Foster Park
On the record
Foster began as a bundle boy in a New York dry-goods store and in 1859 formed the retail firm Foster Brothers with his brother Scott; the firm opened its Fort Wayne branch in 1868. He enlisted as a private in the Ninth New York State Militia in 1861, served three years, and came home a captain, resigning with disability from wounds. After a Terre Haute store and a Grand Rapids newspaper, the Saturday Evening Post, he settled in Fort Wayne in 1877. He pushed the 1882 Indiana Public Library act, was Department Commander of the Indiana G.A.R. in 1885, and helped establish the Indiana State Soldiers' Home at Lafayette, serving on its first board of trustees. In 1891 he organized the Fort Wayne Land and Improvement Company, which laid out the Lakeside district — with liquor sales barred in its deeds across an eventual 500 acres — and helped organize the Tri-State Loan and Trust Company and the Wayne Knitting Mills. His retail business was incorporated as the D. N. Foster Furniture Company in 1884. As longtime president of the Board of Park Commissioners he was remembered as the father of the city's park system, and in 1909 he and his brother Samuel M. Foster gave the city Foster Park. He married Sara J. Pyne on 10 January 1878.
Sources: Griswold, Pictorial History, Vol. II (1917), biographical sketch and portrait, read first-hand. No second source reached for this profile.