Thomas Foster

Died	1682-04-20 Billerica, MA
Select Board
In Office	1660 - 1670

Sergeant Thomas Foster came to Billerica from Braintree. With Daniel Shed and Christopher Web he made up what town historian Henry Hazen called the Braintree families, who settled mostly south and east of the village; Hazen thought he was perhaps the same Thomas Foster who had earlier lived at Weymouth. In June 1659 the town granted him an eight-acre lot. His home lot of fifty acres, with his house on it, lay "on ye east end of Bare hill," bounded by the Shawshin road on the west and by William Hamlet on the north, near the later McKay place. A road laid out in 1661 was to end on "the top of the hill Next to Thomas Foster's fence," which shows that the Woburn road first ran over Bare Hill rather than around it.

Foster was one of the five men named in March 1659-60 as the town's first recorded selectmen, with John Parker, Lieutenant William French, Ralph Hill Sr. and Jonathan Danforth. Hazen credits him with eight years on the board: 1660 to 1661, 1663 to 1665 and 1667 to 1669. When the train band was organized, the town chose him in October 1661 as its "eldest corporal," and in 1662 it sent him to "goe to the great bridge" to work with Chelmsford's committee on the bridge over the Concord River. His name is among the signers of the town's 1664 address to the General Court declaring that its people "doe Rest Satisfied in the present Government."

In November 1670, when Thomas Richardson was fined thirty shillings for carrying two loads of cedar out of the town's swamps, Foster paid the fine for him, and Richardson agreed to build him twenty-two poles of "four-raile fence." By King Philip's War he was a sergeant, and his house near the later Mason place, southeast of Bare Hill, was one of the town's garrisons in 1675. In 1677 he was one of the six men in charge of the squadrons summoned to cut brush along the highways.

Foster and his wife Elizabeth had a son Joseph, born March 28, 1650, later a deacon in Billerica; Hopestill, born in 1648, who lived in Woburn; Experience, who married Joseph French, a newcomer of 1662 who built his house near Foster's; and Elizabeth, who married James Frost. Hazen thought several others were perhaps also his children, among them Thomas, a physician of Roxbury and Cambridge, and John of Mansfield. His will named only his son Joseph and his son-in-law James Frost, though he is known to have had other children as well. The town's record of deaths gives his death as April 20, 1682, while Hazen gives April 20, 1684; the Middlesex probate case on his estate is dated 1682. His widow Elizabeth died January 29, 1694-5.

Thomas Foster

Thomas Foster

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