![]() Foster even homesteaded for a year in Oregon in 1905, although he also worked a series of odd jobs as a miner, sheepherder, sawmill worker and railroad employee during that year before abandoning the farm. ![]() Over the next ten years he worked in fertilizer plants in Reading, Pennsylvania and Jacksonville, Florida, as a railroad construction worker and sawmill employee in Florida, as a streetcar motorman in New York City, as a lumber camp and longshoreman in Portland, Oregon and as a sailor. Foster left that position three years later to work in a white lead factory. Foster left school at the age of ten to apprentice himself to a die sinker. His family moved to the Irish area of Skittereen in Philadelphia, where his father worked as a stableman and was part of a group of Irish-American Fenians. During his peripatetic childhood his mother had nine surviving children of 23 babies she bore. His mother, Elizabeth McLoughlin, was an English Catholic textile worker. ![]() ![]() He was born William E Foster in Taunton, Massachusetts on 25 February 1881, son of a Fenian, James Foster, who had fled County Carlow after the failure of the revolutionary Fenian Rising in Ireland and the waves of arrests that drove hundreds of others out of the country. ![]()
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