SoutheasternRoots: Genealogical and Historical Research

George W. Foster

A Young Lawyer Goes to His Wife's Grave and Blows Out His Brains with a Pistol.

 Tuskaloosa, Feb. 27—George W. Foster, a young lawyer of this city, committed suicide this morning about 9 o'clock in the old cemetery, whither he had gone, accompanied by his cousin, Mr. Noble Foster. As they neared the grave of Mrs. Bell Booth Foster, G. W. Foster's wife, who has been dead three years, he requested his cousin to leave him alone for a few minutes. He then placed a pistol to his head and blew his brains out and fell lifeless across his wife's grave. No cause is assigned for the act.

The sad tragedy detailed above will cause wide regret, as there are few readers of the Age-Herald who do not know about Geo. W. Foster and the beautiful woman who was his wife.

Mrs. Foster was a Miss Belle Woodruff, of Tuscaloosa, and in her young ladyhood was a belle among the belles of a city famous for the beauty and grace of its women. She married a Mr. Booth and went to Mississippi to live, returning a number of years afterward, about 1879, as a widow, with three bright and handsome children. The years had but added to her beauty of face and the stately grace of her figure. At her home in Tuskaloosa, in the gay society of the State Capitol, in Birmingham—everywhere she went, admirers crowded about her, and her social triumph was complete.

George Foster was a young lawyer, a member of the numerous, wealthy and highbred Foster family, which is part and parcel of the county and city of Tuskaloosa. Though much her junior, he fell in love with the beautiful widow Booth and she with him, and about five years ago they were married. They afterward removed to Anniston, where young Foster practiced law. There was no cloud on the happiness of their life until the darkness of death came to the wife in the shape of a sudden illness, and falling back in the arms of her devoted young husband she was dead.

Mr. Foster afterward went back to Tuskaloosa, where he lived until the tradgedy of yesterday. The Age-Herald's special assigns no cause for the unhappy deed. Could it have been aught than grief for his beautiful dead wife?

Jacksonville Republican, Jacksonville, Alabama, 9 March 1889, page 2, column 2.

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