Sarah Jane Foster

Sarah Jane Foster (October 12, 1839 – June 25, 1868) She grew up in Gray, Maine. Her exact level of education is unknown. Though she was too poor to have attended much in the way of formal schooling (she longed to have enough money to purchase her own books), she was well read and had well-educated siblings, including a doctor, a nurse and author, and a clergyman. Her family attended a Free Will Baptist church.

Undeterred, Foster applied to the American Missionary Society and was hired to work with Francis L. Cardozo in Charleston, South Carolina, but she was soon sent to rural Charleston Neck, where she taught on an isolated farm away from the possible outrages of local whites. There she contracted yellow fever and died back in Maine on June 25, 1868.

Legacy Her great-great-nephew Wayne E. Reilly published selections of her diary entries, letters, and other writings as Sarah Jane Foster, teacher of the freedmen : a diary and letters and diary entries of Foster and her sister as The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.