Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1691
Today we have a close-up detail from John Foster’s headstone from 1681.
John Foster, the fourth child of Hopestill and Mary (Bates) Foster, was the earliest engraver in what is now the United States and was the first printer in Boston. He was not the sour Puritan of legend, for he played the fiddle and is believed to have painted the likenesses of some of his contemporaries, John Davenport and Richard Mather, among others. He excised a likeness of Mather on a wood block and printed an engraving of him. He was the author an almanac for which he made his own astronomical calculations.
John Foster graduated from Harvard College in 1667 and began to teach in Dorchester in October 1669. He began cutting in wood as early as 1671 and he set up a printing press in Boston in 1675. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 32.
John Foster made “A Map of New England” to illustrate William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England printed in Boston in 1677.
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