ONEJUNE 2, 1892
Beneath a chestnut tree along the banks of the Neversink River, the two lovers awoke to the familiar cry of train 97 as it came down the valley from Otisville and crossed the trestle, where it entered Port Jervis. It was the morning of June 2, 1892, so early the village behind them had barely stirred, yet the sun was already warm—a portent of summer.
Philip Foley and Lena McMahon had chosen this remote spot because they were avoiding the world just now, particularly Lena’s parents. Lena, twenty-two, had become smitten the previous fall with the dapper Foley, a decade her senior, who was new to Port Jervis and sold insurance for a New York firm. He was a highly presentable man, undeniably handsome, a “ready talker” who dressed well and kept his mustache neatly groomed. Initially, Lena’s parents had welcomed him as a likely suitor for their daughter, a striving young man of business who shared their Irish American heritage. But all that had changed in January after he was arrested for trying to duck out on a hotel bill and other unflattering accounts of his behavior came to light.
The McMahons, John and Theresa, lived in a modest house on the north side of town. John was a glassblower, a skilled job in what was a prominent local industry. The family also maintained a confectionery, where Theresa had once made fudge, licorice, and other treats; although by 1892 it appears to have been operated as a shop. Lena had recently assumed its management and, as a local paper noted, added several flavors of ice cream to the menu. Raven-haired with large brown eyes, Lena was taller than other young women her age, had an imposing presence, and was well-spoken and considered bright. “Her mental traits are in keeping with her personal appearance,” one local newspaper would relate, for “she is a girl of considerable beauty [who] received an excellent education in the public schools of Port Jervis.” Although she still lived with her parents, she handled her own and the shop’s finances and traveled independently—mainly to Middletown, a larger city twenty miles away, or to Goshen, the county seat, but also occasionally to Boston or New York.
There was a sense of fragility and secretiveness about Lena, however, possibly a consequence of her having lived her first five years in a New York orphanage. She was known to sometimes lose track of her surroundings and even claim a loss of her short-term memory. Walking home along Fowler Street from Sunday school in May 1878, she lost her footing and tumbled into a creek. Discovered unconscious in the shallow water a few minutes later, she was carried to the home of David Swinton on Barcelow Street, whose family co-owned a hardware emporium. The Swintons revived her, exchanged her wet, muddy clothes for dry ones, then sent her home in a wagon. Lena told her anxious parents she did not know exactly what had happened; one moment she was walking along looking in a book she had with her, and then she recalled nothing except waking up in another family’s house. As she had no head wound, it appeared she had lost consciousness before entering the water. “It is thought she may have had a fit,” the Gazette reported. As a result of such episodes, the McMahons tended to be overprotective of her health and well-being, and, as she grew up and came to be regarded as one of the more attractive and popular local young women, of her reputation.
Lena had mixed thoughts about playing it safe, it would appear. She seemed wary of the too-comfortable fate of becoming just another Port Jervis wife, a “Goddess of the Household” with a recipe box and an herb garden. Her waking dreams, when she indulged them, tended to carry her well beyond the surrounding hills.
That greater world announced itself with frequent intrusions—the piercing blasts of train whistles and the churning of steam locomotives near and far—for Port Jervis was a busy railroad town. Residents knew intimately the comings and goings of the day’s numerous trains—the Three, the Milk, the Extra 10, the 620 Westbound—and often each train’s assigned conductor and engineer. Children who grew up in the village were accustomed to seeing passengers from New York and other cities disembark from the trains, to watching maneuvered along the platforms the towering carts of luggage and the trunks of “the summer people” who came each May to the resorts and boardinghouses. Traveling salesmen passed through town—“drummers,” as they were known—with their cases that opened into displays of costume jewelry or household goods, as did a continual stream of touring vaudevillians, violin prodigies, and revivalists. There appeared also the pool hustlers, card sharps, and con men. Last night’s new acquaintance might, by sunup, be a hundred miles away, for the railroad was as much about the discreet getaway as the grand arrival.
Monday, May 30, had been Decoration Day, a military holiday of considerable importance in Port Jervis, home to about 125 Civil War veterans, including Lena’s father. Scores of veterans from the surrounding area were also in attendance. It had been a somber occasion of mourning and patriotic speeches, beginning at the village’s own forty-five-foot-tall memorial to the war in Orange Square and continuing with a march to several local cemeteries to honor the Union soldiers who had died during or since the war. But it was also a day of reunion, renewed comradeship, fraternal toasting, and staggering quantities of beer. The following morning found the municipal benches occupied by dozens of spent celebrants, fast asleep.
That same Tuesday morning, Foley had come calling for Lena at her home on West Street, only to be met by a decidedly inhospitable Theresa McMahon. She’d earlier tried unsuccessfully to have him arrested for vagrancy, a charge particularly insulting in Port Jervis, where it was commonly leveled at “depot loafers,” tramps, and Black men of no apparent means. Now she refused to let Lena come downstairs to see him and ordered Foley to leave at once. “Well, I’ll get square with you yet,” he muttered while walking away. The mother then turned on Lena, whose infatuation with the older man she could no longer abide. Mother and daughter argued about the matter until Theresa’s frustration erupted, and she struck Lena hard enough in the face to draw blood. Stunned and humiliated, the young woman quickly threw some items into a bag and fled the house, vowing never to return.
* * *
Port Jervis was an ideal setting for glass manufacturing given its proximity to the Pennsylvania anthracite fields; coal, transported by canal to the village, provided the fuel for the fires needed to anneal and mold glass’s raw materials into finished products. The opening of a new glass factory on the northeast side of town, owned and managed by William Pountney and Charles Brox, had drawn John and Theresa Reddy McMahon there from Boston in the late 1860s, along with two of Theresa’s relations, Thomas and Edward Reddy. Thomas, aged nineteen in 1870, was likely Theresa’s younger brother; Edward, ten, is listed in both 1870 and 1880 census records as Theresa’s nephew, although a later news article from 1886 refers to him as her son. If the latter is true, she would have given birth to him in 1861, when she was only sixteen, which may account for the alternative identification the family twice provided to the census taker. In a small, everybody-knows-your-business place like Port Jervis, where, the joke went, it was harder keeping your name out of the paper than getting it in, she may have thought it prudent to safeguard their true relationship. The McMahons in 1870 resided in a house near the canal with several other men employed at Pountney-Brox. By 1880, Thomas had departed and Eddie, then nineteen, and ten-year-old Lena, who had been adopted in 1874, were, along with their parents, its sole occupants.
The factory thrived. Employing seventy to one hundred skilled workmen and boys at forty to fifty cents an hour and three dollars a week, respectively, the plant filled dozens of freight cars per month with tableware, lamps, and other glass products, which were shipped all over the country. So good was business that in 1873, Charles Brox left to start another glass manufacturing facility, known as Brox-Buckley, on the opposite end of town closer to the railroad.
The McMahons, like many other families of men employed at Pountney, were part of the village’s residential expansion, as workers’ homes filled in the former cornfields north of Main Street. By the mid-1880s, Edward, now a young man, had returned to Boston to work as a horse car conductor, and John, Theresa, and Lena moved to an attractive house at 3 West Street, just off Kingston Avenue.
Copyright © 2022 by Philip Dray