The Foster house illustrates common building trends of southern Windsor County from 1775 to 1825. Reverend Dan Foster was the first settled minister in Weathersfield. Beginning in 1784 he was paid the equivalent of forty-five English pounds annually, one-third in cash, the rest in beef, pork, and grain, and all his firewood. In addition, the town leased land for him across from the meetinghouse. Already occupied by a one-room, end-chimney house, it was expanded for Foster with a one-and-a-half-story two-room house, which is now the ell. When the owner sold the land c. 1794, Foster lost his house, and receiving no adjustment by the town, he soon left. James Converse, the minister after 1801, built an I-house on the opposite side of the road, facing the meetinghouse to the north. The old house became a tavern, and a Federal I-house was added to the front about 1825 when it served as Horace Cooks Tavern. When James Goldsmith bought the property in 1832, he connected the house with another ell and a barn. The house was restored in the 1940s and the homestead donated to the Weathersfield Historical Society, which maintains it today as a museum of early town life. In 1993 the society acquired an eighteenth-century, wood-frame English barn from nearby and moved it to this site to replace one that was once attached at the south end of the ell, re-creating the connected house and barn arrangement. The barn is a good example of the region's earliest multipurpose barns, with “gunstocked” oak posts, clear-span girts, and a sturdy rafter and purlin roof structure. Both house and barn are open to the public.