Caroline Rose Foster (6 April 1877 – 26 July 1979) was an American farmer and philanthropist who managed Fosterfields, a working farm in Morristown, New Jersey, United States.

After they married, they lived with Charles's sister Harriet Foster and her husband John Seely Ward on Pierrepont Street in the Brooklyn Heights.

With her infant daughter, Emma Foster travelled to Tennessee and other Southern states with a nurse to receive medical care.

Referring to a memory from 1883, Foster has stated:[13]At the mature age of six, my greatest joy was to sit by the side of [Jacob Arnold's road] and watch the world go by in buggies, farm wagons, ahorse and afoot.

[3] From about 1880 to 1890, Foster recalled traveling to Castle Garden (New York's immigration center before Ellis Island) to hire young women as soon as they arrived from Ireland.

Her social debut was held on April 7, 1896, at 11 pm in McAlpin Hall in Morristown, a venue that often hosted dances and entertainments at the time.

[17] In 1979, at age 101, Foster recalled that all her friends from Miss Dana's were there, and the boys were home from college for spring break; she stated, "Everyone danced with me – they had to, it was my party.

[21] She was also involved in the Morristown Library's Modern Mondays, a monthly reading club that included anthropologist Ethel Cutler Freeman, author Dorothy Kunhardt, and Elinor Parker, manager of Scribner's Book Store.

In place of women's dresses customary to the era, photographs display Foster in masculine clothing including men's hats, ties, shirt, jacket, and shoes paired with a skirt.

[24] Around this time, she had daily supervision of the farm employees, and her father was also losing his hearing, which biographer Becky Hoskins claims "must have been frustrating" for Foster.

[27][7] Historic landscape consultant Marta McDowell considers the cottage's flower garden historically significant because it "displays features that span the history of the 19th- and 20th-century American gardening: the Romantic era of the early 1800s, the Colonial Revival of 1876 onwards, and the imported English perennial borders of the early 20th century.

"[7] The garden historically included lilacs, peonies, irises, phlox, and daisies, as described in Foster's diary entries and illustrated in her close friend Hattie Evans's 1920 watercolor landscape of the cottage.

[30][31] Circa 1918, Foster details a WWI-related event on April 4: Spoke at the Palace and Park theatres on behalf of the Red Cross.

[7]Circa 1918, from March to October, Foster canvassed the Morristown community to fundraise for Liberty bonds to expend the Allies in the Great War.

Foster wanted to own an automobile, and it can be assumed her family had the wealth to afford it, but her father's opposition to vehicles prevented her from doing so.

"[32] The chauffeur of Henry Rawle's[33] family at Knox Hill Road drove the car to Fosterfields to deliver it on Christmas Day.

You could enjoy the ride and watch the scenery and stop at the side of the road for lunch.At 8 pm, she arrived at her aunts' house in Hartford and went right to bed, presumably from exhaustion.

[21] Caroline Foster inherited the 213.4-acre Fosterfields property and she chose to step into her father's role as the superintendent of the farm; friend claims she "became more outspoken, but in most ways, lived as before.

While investing in diversified stock market portfolios, she regularly visited Morristown to demand detailed accountings of her holdings from her banker.

Other anecdotes include scavenging used lumber from Epstein's Department Store to build a doghouse and insisting that her relatives should pay for the farm's dairy products like any other consumer.

Published in 1960, when Foster was 83, their collaborative nonfiction book was written, in part to prevent the historic Washington Valley district from being converted into a reservoir by the Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority.

[8] Hoskins has stated, "If [Caroline Foster] had lived in another era, she could have been a great lawyer or master mechanic...I never knew anyone like her and I never expect to again.

[7] Whereas Foster's collaboration with Hoskins focused on documenting past historic sites, many of which have since been demolished, her friendship with Myers concerned the future of the farm, particularly after her death.

[21]In 1972, she was invited to meet First Lady Pat Nixon at the Seeing Eye because, at 95, Foster was "the oldest Republican Committee woman in Morris County.

"[20] In 1972, when she was 95 years old, Foster donated 120 acres of land to the Morris County Park Commission, but she retained the right to hay the field.

[7] While writing her will in 1974, Foster arranged to bequeath Fosterfields to the Morris County Park Commission to be preserved as a "living historical farm" – a type of open-air museum.

[2] Upon her death in 1979, she donated "a sizable sum from her estate" to New Jersey's DPH Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

They contained illustrations of ice skating, horse racing, fisticuffs, farm activities, and leisurely country life.

Their restoration projects included The Willows, the Temple of Abiding Peace, Foster's original Model T Ford, and the cottage garden.

[47] In 2016, the "Friends of Fosterfields" volunteer group celebrated their 30th anniversary by re-planting Caroline Foster's cottage garden to resemble its historic arrangement.