Ebenezer Foster

Quick Facts

Date of Birth:

1744

Place of Death:

New City, NY (present-day Lansingburg, New York)

Date of Death:

September 26, 1777

Ebenezer Foster (born 1744) of Westford, Massachusetts, was no stranger to loss. His first wife, Ruth, died within a year after their 1766 marriage. He then married his second cousin, Hannah Foster, in 1768, but two of their four children “died young.” Then came the Revolutionary War.

Ebenezer was on board to fight against British tyranny from the very start. A private soldier in Captain Underwood’s company of Colonel William Prescott’s Regiment of Minute-men, Eben fought against the ministerial troops along “Battle Road” during the British withdrawal to Boston from Concord on April 19, 1775. He also served in Colonel Eleazer Brooks’s Regiment of Middlesex County, Massachusetts Militia in the fall of 1776, during which time he combated the Redcoats in the Battle of White Plains, New York.

With 1777 around the corner, Massachusetts rearranged its Continental Army regiments and officers recruited in earnest. Volunteers were lacking, however, and so the state initiated draft policies. It appears that Eben wasn’t too keen to serve this time around – he fought in 1775 and in 1776, and he had a broken family to look after. But the hand of fate selected him from amongst the militia rolls, and Ebenezer was enrolled as a private soldier in Captain Ballard’s company of Colonel Ichabod Alden’s (7^th) Massachusetts Regiment.

Originally assigned to the Lower Hudson River Valley defenses, Alden’s Regiment was transferred north and joined the Northern Army at Fort Edward in mid-July 1777. The soldiers of this regiment and others in its brigade were the ones who decimated the landscape between Forts Anne and Edward to slow down the British advance from Canada that summer. Eben even fought in the small, half-hour long Battle of Kingsbury on July 22.

But Eben would not live to fight again. He became sick on the eve of the Battles of Saratoga in September and was placed in the Flying Hospital located at New City (present-day Lansingburg, New York), where he died on September 26. His remains were laid to rest in the nearby burial yard.

In November, a Middlesex County diarist wrote that a William Foster “lately rec’d news of his son Noah's death killed in battle [at Saratoga]. & of Ebenezer Foster who died of sickness in ye Army.” Noah, who will be the subject of a future In Memoriam post, was Hannah’s brother. Now a widow, Hannah was left to raise her son William and daughter Sally on her own.