J Best Foster Photographs
These photographs come from an album kept by my great-uncle, John Best Foster.
J Best Foster was born in 1870 in Lucas County, Iowa. He was eldest of the twelve children of John Madison Worth Foster and Rachael B Best.
J Best Foster's maternal grandparents, Jacob Cruzen Best and Harriett Walker Bitner, moved to California, eventually settling in Tulare. In the early 1890's J Best Foster followed his grandparents (and other maternal relatives) to California, setting up a photography business in Escondido.
By 1899 J Best Foster had moved his photography business to Lorimor, Iowa. A younger brother James B. Foster (1875-1938) had married Ethel Donner in 1898 in Lorimor. J Best called his Lorimor business "Foster's Fancy Fotos." He is listed as a resident of the Hillman Hotel in Lorimor in the 1900 Census. The hotel was located on the north side of Main Street near the railroad.
He married Mina Victoria Westfall in September 1905 in Saline County, Kansas. [Mina appears in several of the Lorimor photographs.] They had one child, Martha Ellen (b. July 1906 in Clay County Missouri, d. Dec 1998), who married Ben Jones in 1926. Collections of J Best Fosters' Photographs from Escondido and Lorimor were given to my mother, Leona Foster Marshall in the early 1980's by her first cousin, Martha Ellen.
By the early 1920's J Best Foster was living near Donaldson, Arkansas where he died in July 1950.
There are three groups of J Best Foster photographs:
1. Prints marked with his Escondido stamp or obviously made in the same studio as those photos (the originals prints were donated to the San Diego Historical Society in 1999).
2. A collection of 50 prints bound in a hardback album most of which are known to have been made in Lorimor, Iowa (the subjects of this web page).
3. Miscellaneous lose photos - primarily family photos.
Click on image to enlarge
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Created 10 January 2011
