John Foster's gravestone, Dorchester North Burying Ground

“The ingenious mathematician and printer, Mr. John Foster, aged 33 years, dyed Septr 9th 1681,” as the Boston Public Library’s catalogue reads the stone. Above the inscription a skeleton, Death, reaches up to snuff a candle standing on a globe, while winged Father Time, with his hourglass and scythe, grasps his arm to hold him back, all under a smiling sun. It is one of the finest carved stones of seventeenth-century New England, and fitting for the man who cut the first map made in the colonies and the earliest portrait print known from them. John Foster, son of Capt. Hopestill Foster of Dorchester and brother of Ensign Hopestill Foster, died at Dorchester four years after his woodcut map of New England appeared; Rev. Richard Mather, whose portrait he had cut, lies in the same ground.