A Never-Ending "Farewell!"?
Stephen Foster was born on July 4, 1826, in a modest house in Lawrenceville—a neighborhood named by his father, William Barclay Foster Sr., after James Lawrence, captain of the Chesapeake during War of 1812 (Lawrence's alleged last words were “Don’t give up the Ship”). This frame structure, affectionately known by the Foster family as the “White Cottage” (Fig. 1), was built in the Federal style, which was a refinement of the earlier Georgian mode favored by wealthy New England merchants. It included a hipped roof, sidelights flanking the front door, and a fanlight set above the entrance—all Federal hallmarks. Though generally an East Coast style popular between 1780 and 1820, the Federal architectural influence drifted west over the Appalachians during the Market Revolution. [i]
According to Morrison Foster, Stephen’s brother who was also born in the cottage in 1823 (a total of five Foster children were born there), the little house stood on a tract of land purchased by their father who in 1814 “established his residence . . . on the Allegheny River 2 ½ miles above Pittsburgh.” The cottage was situated on an angled, four-acre plot (Outlot No. 9 on the plan of Lawrenceville in Fig. 2) located on a sloping rise along what was then known as Philadelphia Pike (Penn Avenue today). Morrison claimed that the cottage was “the only private residence outside of town in that neighborhood where open house was kept,”—meaning that travelers passing by on the pike were welcome to stop for food and rest, and that “its generous board was free to all comers at all times.” [ii]
Evelyn Foster Morneweck, Morrison’s daughter, describes the structure (based on the recollections of her father) in her two-volume Chronicles of Stephen Foster’s Family as a “main building measure[ing] fifty feet across the front, and contain[ing] four rooms on one floor with a center hall. It was painted white and finished with green shutters. A two-story wing of three or more rooms stretched to the east.” The Foster family found both the cottage and the property an idyllic pastoral setting that included farm animals, a natural spring, and a grassy dell laced with woodbine. The work to maintain it, however, was done mostly by indentured servants and hereditary term slaves. [iii]
The Fosters would not remain long in what biographer Ken Emerson calls their “American Eden”. In fact, the house that Stephen Foster and his family seem to have held so dear in memory had its mortgage foreclosed by the Bank of the United States in May of 1826—less than two months before Stephen’s birth. William B. Foster had been strapped with debt for some time. As Quartermaster and Commissary for the Army in Pittsburgh, he had spent his own money to equip the famous vessel Enterprise, which aided General Andrew Jackson in winning the Battle of New Orleans in January of 1815, and was never fully repaid. He continued to be employed in a variety of positions, including manager of a turnpike transportation company, member of the Pennsylvania state legislature, and Collector of Tolls on the Blairsville-Pittsburgh canal. But he was unable to continue to afford the White Cottage. The family rented it for a time from the Bank after the foreclosure, but ultimately it was sold on September 6, 1827, to a grocer named Malcolm Leech for $4,000. The precise date (and year for that matter) that the Fosters moved out of the White Cottage is unknown. However, by 1829 the family had taken up household on Water Street in a rented house in an exclusive neighborhood. [iv]
From this point the White Cottage and the property on which it stood went through many alterations and had several owners. Leech added a brick addition to the main frame cottage building. In 1864 Andrew Kloman, a partner of Andrew Carnegie, bought it and tore down the frame cottage and replaced it with a large brick wing in the then-popular Second Empire style, complete with a mansard roof (Fig.3). Between 1884 and 1914 it changed hands again and was ultimately presented to the City of Pittsburgh by steel mogul James Park “to be maintained as a shrine to the memory of Stephen C. Foster.” For several years after this donation, Stephen’s daughter Marion Foster Welch and her children Matthew Wiley Welch and Jessie Welsh Rose lived in the house as caretakers. Marion gave piano lessons there into her seventies (Fig. 4). In the mid-twentieth century the City of Pittsburgh relinquished the house and property, and it became a funeral home for two decades. By the late 1970s it was sitting derelict, until purchased by Robert Boudreau of the American Wind Symphony Orchestra. He converted the house into apartments and used it as offices. He also planted fruit trees and transformed the funeral home parking lot into a lawn where the symphony orchestra would give free performances. Today it remains apartments, situated in one of the busiest sections of Lawrenceville with a commemorative sign on the front lawn placed there by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. [v]
One additional note on the history of the house and property is worth mentioning. There was a controversy in which the White Cottage was misidentified as being located on nearby Outlot 7. A carpenter named William Toman purchased this lot in the late 1820s and built a home on it that resembled the Foster cottage. In 1934 Henry Ford, believing the Towman house to be the White Cottage (as it was often mistaken by Pittsburghers) bought it to include in Greenfield Village, a collection of historical buildings at his museum in Dearborn, Michigan. This house was later proved not to be the White Cottage—a fact that Evelyn Foster Morneweck exhaustively details in thirty-three pages in Appendix II, Volume 2 of her Chronicles. Today the Towman house, still located on the grounds of Greenfield Village, houses musical instruments of the nineteenth-century and serves as a “Foster Memorial” (Fig. 5). It is no longer listed as Stephen Foster’s birthplace.[vi]
The White Cottage was both beloved and mourned by the Fosters who lived there and could remember it. Evelyn Foster Morneweck in her Chronicles of Stephen Foster's Family records an anecdote regarding one of Stephen’s brothers, Henry, “walking long blocks out of his way in order to pass the dearly remembered spot where he had spent his childhood.” Eliza Foster recollected the cottage’s beauty in her quasi-fictional “Sketches and Incidents of Pittsburgh” written later in her life and based on the years that the family lived there. Her descriptions of it conjure images of the idealized prints of American country life later published by Currier & Ives (Fig. 6):
The sloping terraced grounds about the Cottage, dressed
off with many a rose and dancing flower, laughed gaily
on that sweet morning in the bright sunlight. I knew that
a happy home awaited me, with breakfast table laid, and
husband kind, and infant footsteps pressing the green sod.
Later, reflecting on the cottage and the loss of her piano-playing daughter Charlotte who died in 1829, Eliza writes: “The delightful cottage and the sound of the deep-toned instruments still comes dancing on in the arrear of memory, with pain and sorrow at the thought of how it closed forever with the departure from this transitory stage.” But what effect did all this have on Stephen Foster, who was born in the cottage though left it most likely before reaching the age of two? Almost certainly he had no memories of the place. Morneweck writes that Stephen “probably was too young to be grieved at the loss of the White Cottage, but the regret of his parents and older brothers and sisters was deeply impressed upon his consciousness in later years.” [vii]
One of Stephen's songs, published in March of 1851 by Firth, Pond & Company, a New York sheet-music publisher, hints at this deep impression. According to his account book, by 1857 the song had netted him only $30.58 (roughly $1,000 in 2021 dollars). For comparison, one of his most successful songs, “Old Folks at Home,” also published in 1851, earned $1,647.46 (roughly $54,000 in 2021 dollars). The lyrics, particularly in the first verse, seem to affirm the “deeply impressed” sentiments Morneweck mentions:
Farewell! old cottage,
You and I must part;
I leave your faithful shelter
With a poor breaking heart.
The stranger, in his might,
Hath cast our lot in twain;
The term of our delight
Must close in parting pain.
Ken Emerson suggests that “it’s almost as if the stranger [in the lyrics] were the bank that foreclosed on the Fosters’ White Cottage.” Musicologist William W. Austin cites the many partings Stephen experienced during his early life—and argues that “from 1851 . . . till he died, he continued to dream of the ‘faithful shelter,’ the ‘guiding star,’ the ‘hospitable hearth’ and that his “dreams of ‘Jeanie” and ‘Mother’ blended with his own and his mother’s dream of the ‘Old Cottage.’” These sentiments could be intuited from the lyrics, and support Morneweck’s claims regarding Stephen and the influence of family memory on his work. Ultimately, however, without physical or textual evidence in Stephen’s own hand, it is difficult to firmly establish that Foster was in fact writing about the White Cottage itself in "Farewell! Old Cottage." (Fig. 7) [viii]
Similarly, Stephen writing directly about his personal feelings regarding a home lost is hinted at, though not concretely exemplified, in another song of the period. It is also one of his most famous: “Old Folks at Home" (Fig. 8). The lyrics in the third and final verse of this “Plantation Melody” suggest a longing for a childhood home amidst a lush bucolic scene full of music:
One little hut among de bushes,
One dat I love,
Still sadly to my mem'ry rushes,
No matter where I rove
When will I see de bees a humming
All round de comb?
When will I hear de banjo tumming
Down in my good old home?
The “little hut among de bushes” could be read as a metaphor for the White Cottage; likewise “de banjo tumming” could be viewed as a parallel to the music that Eliza wrote about in a letter to her daughter Charlotte in November of 1821:
Your Father has been drawing a few tunes on the violin
for your little brother and sister to dance this evening—
they have not forgotten the danceing tunes you used to play
on the piano; Henry whistles and Henrietta sings them yet.
In "Old Folks at Home," Stephen has superimposed sentiments of the White Cottage experience onto the homes and experiences of enslaved peoples. The song, which was played at his funeral (discussed in the section "A (Not So) Good Death" on this site) was in this context an echo of the Foster family's idealized "lost Eden." However, as with “Farewell! Old Cottage," without document corroboration from Stephen’s surviving personal papers such correlations remain conjecture—a sort of Foster family myth-making perpetuated by the Fosters who actually remembered the White Cottage as a place and period of happiness before the family’s fortunes declined. This family lore was maintained by several of the Foster children, and perhaps Stephen himself through his songs which longed for a lost “Eden” of youth—the romanticized White Cottage. [ix]