by Geoff Smith
John Foss was a Danish sailor serving aboard a British war vessel that arrived in Boston. Disillusioned with this service, he deserted ship by jumping overboard and swimming to freedom. Soon after he came to Sandy Beach, where he was taken in by the family of John Berry, eventually marrying Berry’s daughter. He was granted 19 acres in Sandy Beach in 1668, and appears on the 1680 census of Sandy Beach. He died approximately 1700. The original Foss homestead stood near the corner of Bracket and Washington Roads.
John was the Foss patriarch, but perhaps we should properly look to his son Joshua as a founder of Rye. Of John Foss’s ten or so children, most born in Sandy Beach, Joshua was the only one with progeny who remained there. Joshua’s name appears in the earliest records, and he was a signer of the petitions of 1721, 1724, and both petitions of 1725 seeking to separate Sandy Beach as the “Parish of Rye” from Newcastle. These petitions succeeded in 1726, although the new parish remained part of and subservient to Newcastle. Rye did not gain official independence as a town until 1785.
In 1723 Joshua was granted a share of land adjoining “Locke’s Line” which probably included his father’s homestead. In 1724 he paid tax to the town of Newcastle. In 1726 Joshua Foss deeded the meetinghouse to Rye and was elected a selectman for the Parish of Rye, and in 1728 he paid tax to Rye Parish.
Sandy Beach grew into Rye Parish thanks to descendants of the first settlers who swarmed inland to build roads and houses, and to establish Rye Center, which became the heart of the community. Many – enough to drag down Rye’s population – kept on going and settled in new towns to the west. Joshua’s progeny marched to a different drummer. Although some settled in Exeter, Barrington and other inland towns, a good number stayed put. Later Foss generations remained well represented in Rye, some living in their old Sandy Beach neighborhood. More than two centuries after John Foss acquired his land, an 1892 map of Rye shows one Foss living on Brackett Road near the site of the original Foss homestead and four more Foss houses around the corner, lining both sides of Washington Road down to the ocean.
Next to the Foss home near the ocean end of Washington Road – the dwelling has been much expanded by subsequent owners – sits the Foss family cemetery, bounded by stone walls. Several 19th-century headstones are legible, but time and weather have reduced dozens of older markers to anonymous stubs. The house looks down on the sandiest part of Sandy Beach, still known as Foss Beach.
