Foster House, to the east of the Redan in One Gun Alley, was built on land granted in 1713 to Florentius Richardson, a sailor who left no will and about whom little is known. The main core of the building, perpendicular to One Gun Alley, is a gable-roofed house flanked by two massive chimneys and decorated with Flemish gables. It was built between 1770 and 1780, probably by Benjamin Richard Wright. His grandfather, mariner Richard Wright, bequeathed a lot near the State House to him in 1770, but by the time Richard’s widow Rachel made her will in 1780 a house had been erected. She confirmed that the property was to go to Benjamin and his siblings.

By 1800 the Wrights had sold the house and surrounding garden to mariner Anthony Atwood Sr. He mortgaged the property in 1824 to Hezekiah Frith who, after making a fortune as a privateer, had plenty of money to lend. Atwood, described in the newspaper as ‘an old and respectable inhabitant of St George’s’, died a year later. In 1831 his children sold the house and lot to John William and Isabella Archer.

Archer was of mixed race, born to enslaved parents in Dominica. In the 1820s he worked as a cooper and overseer for Halifax merchant Andrew Belcher and lived in the storehouse adjoining Belcher’s wharf on Glebe Lot 3 (see chapter 4). While still enslaved, Archer married Isabella Budd, a ‘free woman of colour’, on Christmas Eve 1826. He obtained his freedom from Belcher in 1830 and the following year, for £400, he purchased Foster House, which he and his wife had been renting since their marriage.

Like their neighbour Mary Catterall, the Archers were licensed to run a tavern and in the 1830s the pair of Duke of York Street bars were favourites among soldiers, sailors and St Georgians. By 1842 the Archers had acquired enough money to purchase both Mitchell House for £300 and another store. In 1845 their real estate, furniture and stockin-trade exceeded £1,330, a figure which placed the Archers among the most successful members of the Black community in St George’s.

But success had its price. In May 1848 Archer was admitted as one of the first patients of Bermuda’s new Lunatic Asylum in Devonshire because he suffered from ‘mania’ brought about by ‘intemperance’ and from chronic delusions. After five years of unsuccessful treatment, Archer’s sudden death in January 1853 was as remarkable as his life. Before doctors had a chance to perform an autopsy, Archer’s friends broke into the asylum and stole his body in the middle of the night. Because Isabella had predeceased him and his sisters in Bermuda had all died, the property reverted to the Crown. In 1871 their daughter Nancy, living in Basseterre, Guadeloupe, petitioned for and was granted the property which she sold the following year to Thomas Ward Kelly for £325. Kelly leased the building to the operators of a tavern called The Gun.

Grocer Thomas William Foster purchased the property in 1900 from Kelly’s estate for £175 at public auction. Although he also owned The Casino to the south, the fact that this building came to be known as Foster House suggests that this is where he and his family lived. He died in 1927 and the property passed briefly through a number of hands before Clyde Basden acquired it in 1944 and joined it with Clyde’s Café next door. Nineteenth century maps of St George’s reveal that, with the exception of a small addition to the southwest corner built between 1854 and 1876, the building’s footprint has not changed since the 1770s. The stone porch and projecting stairs are 20th century additions which obscure the original Georgian facade.