Foster Park Trail

6 1/2 Miles Long 

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DAVID N. FOSTER    

1841-1934

Colonel David N. Foster has been intimately identified with nearly every activity designed for the good of the people of Fort Wayne. He is best remembered as the “father” of the present city park system. It is of such a man that this sketch treats a type of citizen which has enabled Fort Wayne to take and maintain a leading position among the municipalities of the middle west. Col. Foster was born in Coldenham, Orange County, New York, April 24, 1841. At the early age of fourteen, he left his father’s farm and commenced his career as a businessman in the capacity of “bundle boy” in the store of W.E. Lawrence, an old timeNew York City dry goods merchant. In 1859, at the age of eighteen, incompany with his brother, Scott Foster, he formed the retail dry goods firm of Foster Brothers of New York City, which in 1868 turned it’s attention to the west and opened its first branch. In 1861, Col. Foster enlisted as a private in the Ninth New York State Militia. With this regiment he saw three years of service in the Union Army, resigning because of disability arising from wounds.

In 1871, Col. Foster came to Indiana,opened the store of Foster Brothers at Terre Haute. In 1873 he was attracted into the field of newspapers and withdrew from the Terre Haute firm. At Grand Rapids,  Michigan he established the Saturday Evening Post, a literary and newspaper, an enterprise which met with marked success. In 1877, Col. Foster’s attention was directed to the wideawake city of Fort Wayne.

One of the earliest acts of Col. Foster, which exhibits his public-spiritedness, was the effort to secure the passage by the Indiana legislature in 1882 of the Public Library Act, having libraries come under the direct control of the boards of public school trustees, and be established through the levying of a special tax by the city council. The present public library and its excellent management are the outgrowth of this pioneer effort.

In 1891, with a clear vision of Fort Wayne’s future growth, Col. Foster organized the Fort Wayne Land and Improvement Company, which assumed the big task of creating the present beautiful section of the city known as Lakeside. With a firm belief that saloons should not be permitted in residential districts, he advised that the sale of liquors be forever prohibited in that addition consisting of one hundred and sixty acres, and the company so decided. The same clause was subsequently placed in the provisions of other contiguous and neighboring additions, until an area of 500 acres in that part of the city never know the presence of a saloon. In the same year that the Fort Wayne Land and Improvement Company came into existence, Col. Foster assisted in the organization of the Tri-State Loan and Trust Company as the subscriber for the first 25 shares of the company’s stock. He was one of the original stockholders which, under the leadership of Theodore F. Thieme, organized the great corporation known as the Wayne Knitting Mills.

He will always be remembered as the “father” of the present splendid park system of Fort Wayne. In 1909 he and his brother Samuel M. Foster, donated to the city, Foster Park. A large and in some respects, the most useful and beautiful of all of Fort Wayne’s parks. He has said that the only praise to which he and his brother are entitled in this connection, is the credit of having shown discriminating sense in the selection of amonument which would endure and grow more beautiful and more serviceable as years go by.

Colonel David N. Foster passed on in September 1934 at an age of 93. The following is a letter written to the News-Sentinel by Col. Foster in 1926:

 ‘When at last the end comes and in the full possession of my faculties. I wrap the drapery of my couch about me and lie down as if to pleasant dreams, don’t publish that I died of senility. You may say of me ‘he died of old age’ or ‘of advanced years’ or “he passed away in the full possession of his faculties’, or you may sugar-coat the announcement in any other way you can devise, but don’t say ‘died of senility’. If you must use that word at all save it for the unfortunate, where the effects of senility have made him for months or for fears a charge upon his family, his friends or the state; for one whose physical strength has far outlived his mental faculties and he has become a victim of dementia ‘senile dementia’, in other words ‘soft pedal’ the announcement for us old fellows when we shall finally pass on.

DAVID N. FOSTER.”

SAMUEL M. FOSTER

The telling of the story of the life and interests of Samuel M. Foster imposes upon the biographer a task of considerable magnitude. Mr. Foster was born in Coldenham, Orange County, New York, December 12, 1851, the son of John L. and Harriet (Scott) Foster. He was the youngest of seven children, six of whom were boys. At the age of fourteen he went to New York and entered upon employment in a dry goods store conducted by his brothers but three years afterward, he located to Troy, New York, where at the age of twenty-one, formed a partnership with his brother A.Z. Foster, also in the retail dry goods business. The brothers in later years were very successful merchants in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The Troy venture proved to be profitable and two years later, Samuel M. Foster found himself financially able to carry out a plan to secure a collegiate education. He sold his interest in the Troy establishment and entered Yale at New Haven, Connecticut. On June 26. 1879, Mr. Foster received the degree of Bachelor of Arts and graduated fourteenth in a class of two hundred members.

Mr. Foster came to Fort Wayne in the fall of 1879, and entered the law offices of Judge Robert S. Taylor. He had not determined the nature of his life work, but was aware of the value of an education along the line which the reading of the law would provide. At this same time, he was concerned with regard to the condition of his health, which had become impaired during the closing strenuous days of his work at Yale, and he determined to abandon for the time being, at least, the more or less confining work of the law office and to enter upon a career of journalism. The way was opened at Dayton, Ohio where the Saturday Evening Record was established, with Mr. Foster as the editor and proprietor. The experience was brief and it appears to have convinced Mr. Foster that a continuance in this line at that time would have been ruinous to both health and purse. 

In 1882 Samuel M. Foster returned to Fort Wayne and went into the dry goods business on Calhoun Street between Main and Berry. The business did not go well, and was about to go under when in 1884, Samuel M. Foster became the “father of the shirt waist’. Referring to this most interesting period, Mr. Foster, in an interview published in 1904 said: “It’s the same old story. Necessity was the mother of invention. I was in the retail goods business over on Calhoun Street. I had precious little capital and most of it was borrowed. Rent was high and trade was dull. ‘A general flavor of mild decay’ pervaded the establishment, and there was great danger that the business would dry up and blow away.”

“One day in the winter of 1884-5, when the thermometer was too low to read, and a customer was as scarce as natural gas. I just happened to recall that during the proceeding summer I had bought some boys unlaundered shirt waists that were good sellers and hard to get. I fell to wondering whether we could not make some for the next season, using the materials from the store and having the clerks cut them out. There wasn’t one left in stock, but inquiry among the clerks revealed the fact that one of them had one at home in the wardrobe of his little boy. When he brought it to the store the next day, it was a sorry-looking object, worn out and faded by many washing, but I wish I had it today. I would be tempted to have it handsomely framed and installed among those who have been my best friends. How little it takes to change the current of men’s lives! How small a thing will sometimes turn failure aside and bring success in its stead, or vice versa. It fairly makes one shudder to think how much often depends upon the way we decide the merest trifle. Perhaps the same small measure of success would have followed along some other chain of events, but we can never measure the might have been.” |

“Be that as it may, the little rag of a shirt waist was the start of what little material success I may have met with. What did I do with it? Well, I took it and with my own hands ripped it apart, and from the different parts made something resembling patterns. Then I cut one out and one of the clerks sewed it together. When it was done it was like the boy who was to wear it, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made.’ Then we guessed how much bigger the largest sizes should be and how much smaller the smaller.”

“Then we skirmished about to find ‘kids’ for the average sizes for the various ages from four to fourteen years. After pegging along in this way for awhile, we eventually secured patterns for a line of sizes. I think I did all the work myself. Then we started to make up a little stock. We didn’t even know how to go about cutting them out. We used pocket knives and scissors, and cut about three thicknesses of cloth at a time. Now often we cut sixty at one time and do it easier than when we used to cut three. Everything was petty and crude, but we didn’t know any better. About this time I remember one day my brother, D.N. Foster, and George W. Pixley came in, and finding me haggling away with a jack-knife, remarked with mingled pity and disgust, “Well, that’s great work for a Yale graduate to be at.’”’

“However necessity, like lawyers, “knows no law’ and I had to keep at it. After getting a lot cut, we gave them out to women to make. Our idea, up to this time, was merely to make enough for our own use, but one day it occurred to me that I might sell some to other merchants. So I mailed a sample to about half a dozen dry goods firms that I knew of, together with a personal letter. I remember very well the result, we received three orders for twenty five dozen each. The receipt of these three orders quite elated me. I figured they cost me $1.50 per dozen,not counting the time of the clerks, and we sold them for $2.00 a dozen.Other small orders came in, and I quickly set about increasing ourfacilities. I found out how to cut them and hired a cutter. He is with usyet. We made just one thing, a boys’ calico shirt waist at $2.00 a dozen.The first season we sold three thousand dozen. Clearing $1,500.00, but what was make in the shirt waist business was being promptly lost in the dry goods business, and then some. The second year we sold six thousand dozen, the profits from which promptly again went down the same rathole. About this time I made up my mind to get out of the drygoods business in any way possible. It took a year to accomplish this,but at least it was achieved, and I came out with a whole skin and goodcreed. This was in December 1886, since then it has been smooth sailing, but I have often thought that I worked harder and more intelli-gently when I was going down hill than I ever have since. So you see, asI said before, it was the old story of necessity being the mother of invention. Had I been making a living in the dry goods business, I would have been there yet, but because I wasn’t, I had to devise something else. So a fellow doesn’t ever know what is best for him, or as the believer in special providence puts it: “Behind a frowning counter peace God often hides a smiling face!””’

“Well, who invented the ladies’ shirt waist? Nobody. Like Topsy, it‘just grew’. I have told you we started making boys’ shirt waists in December 1886. By the summer of 1889 we had so developed the business that we were making quite a line of styles in the various sizes,the largest being fourteen years. Along in the spring of that year we found ourselves receiving many reorders for the largest sizes only. Asthe price was based on the average size, and as a fourteen cost about double what a four did, orders for nothing but big sizes left us holding a bag at a great rate. Some requests came for sixteens. We knew boys of that size and age didn’t wear shirt waists, so we set on foot an inquiry to as certain what had created the demand. We discovered that the boys’ sisters were buying these large sizes and wearing them to play croquet and lawn tennis, or to go picnicking in. Soon they began asking for longer sleeves and smaller necks.”

“The next year we made quite a line that met with ready sale, but it was a year of two before we broke loose, and every woman took to wearing them. As we know it, the shirt waist, is an American garment. It originated here and has always been much more generally worn in this country than in Europe.” The shirt waist factory of the S.M. Foster Company was one of Fort Wayne’s leading manufacturing institutions. Mr. S.M. Foster, also in later years, was president of the Wayne Knitting Mills and had a valuable interest in the Fort Wayne Box Company and was president of the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company.

In 1909, in connection with his brother, David N. Foster, he gave to the city of Fort Wayne, Foster Park, the largest and in some regards the finest of the public parks. Foster Park will preserve forever the name of the brothers who in this way, as in many others, have given of their best selves to the upbuilding of their home city.