After Philip Foley’s ouster from the Delaware House, it was reported, he “was frequently seen about the shanties of some negroes along the Erie tracks … [and] lived with a colored family when he was broke, [for] he was usually in that condition.” While many of the town’s African Americans remained north of the village, others resided in the area between Kingston Avenue and the Neversink River, or in the far west end of the Acre, the low-lying land between the rail yards and the Delaware, where, it appears, Foley had found at least a temporary home. Sometimes called “the Bully Acre,” the strip of land was dominated by Irish and Italian gangs, which brawled in defense of territory, while the small Black population did its best to stay out of the way.
The absorption of white men like Foley into what temperance crusaders saw as a Black demimonde of gambling, vice, and whiskey stills was the very issue that often alarmed the town’s church leaders and editorialists. Local press clippings of the era, however, suggest that many whites were drawn to join Blacks in their places of entertainment not solely because they viewed them as exotic or risqué but for the pleasure of listening to Black music and dance, much as George Gershwin, Tallulah Bankhead, Charlie Chaplin, and Theodore Dreiser flocked to Harlem nightclubs a generation later. The newspaper coverage could cut both ways, as the Gazette did in telling of a white man named Jacob Lane who visited Reservoir View frequently, “for he loves to listen to the dulcet tones of the dark-skinned maids of that locality, and lavishes his money upon them for beer, etc.,” but having blissfully dozed off, he awoke to find his wallet missing. Elsewhere the paper cautioned readers of the lure of Black resorts to white youngsters and “low whites,” explaining:
The places are resorted to by young white boys, sons of well-to-do and respectable parents, who would be refused beer or liquor in any respectable drinking house in the village, and who go there simply because they can do so without meeting parents or relatives or acquaintances, who would be likely to inform on them. It is the means of sowing seeds of everlasting degradation that no right-minded person can calmly contemplate without a shudder.
There was considerable hypocrisy in this, for some very grown-up white people might be seen on occasion making their way clandestinely to the town’s illicit establishments. Since the mid-nineteenth century, nightlife in Port Jervis had been centered on the diagonal intersection of Front Street and Jersey Avenue. Some of the place’s rougher edges had been smoothed away by the opening of the new train depot and the related arrival of a better class of hotels, but on railroad paydays the district still took on the feel of a Wild West boomtown, where even the most transient railroad hand could cash a paycheck at Bauer’s Hotel before hitting the saloons. For the presence of its “houses of assignation,” second-story rooms behind lace curtains that could be rented by the hour, the area had become known as “Grab Point.” This was a riff on that other well-known local landmark, Carpenter’s Point, the jut of land where the Neversink merges with the Delaware, the inference being that here one might “grab” whatever one wished—a bottle, a game, or a woman. In a belated effort at respectability, the name, after about 1920, was occasionally given as Graeb Point, on the improbable fiction that an immigrant by that name had once kept a shop nearby.
The railroad was Port Jervis’s lifeline, but the sense of impermanence it created and the mass of newcomers it delivered almost hourly lent this part of town a slack character that was, depending on one’s perspective, either joyfully riotous or woefully debased. Due to the nature of its attractions, it could not afford the pretense of exclusivity; men and women of all races met and mingled there. More moderate citizens held the perceived depravity at arm’s length with school honor rolls, church picnics, and temperance meetings, while the police kept rowdy drunks in line with reminders to move along and, if necessary, a meaningful tap with their batons. It was the era of the nation’s great labor convulsions—Haymarket, Homestead, the Pullman Strike—and while Port Jervis saw relatively little of it, the sense of upheaval, even anarchy, was in the air and rarely skipped a station stop entirely. The police were expected to be vigilant at keeping hooligans and troublemakers in line, whatever their political or professional calling.
How deeply Foley was immersed in this milieu is unclear, but for Theresa and John McMahon it was enough to know that their only daughter was seeing a man who, however refined in manner and attire, upon his release from Goshen jail after two months served had found work at Barber’s, a billiards hall at the corner of Jersey and Front, the very heart of Grab Point. While the McMahons declared Foley an unsuitable companion and forbade further contact, their vivacious daughter was no longer a child. With her intellect and fashionable Gibson Girl figure, Lena might have had her pick of local boys, but she seemed indifferent to the options of dairy farmer or railroad man. Yet, because her own family was working-class, the sons of the town’s professionals and elites were likely inaccessible; neither she nor her parents moved in those circles.
The pet name Foley gave her was “Little Girl,” which may have been a private joke, as she was likely the taller of the two, though he was far more worldly. For him she felt a compelling attraction, an appeal undiminished, perhaps even sharpened, by his recklessness and the vehemence of his pursuit. In his dress, in his charming confidence, he had brought the city to their small-town courtship. Where her friends and family thought him overly slick, she sought to protect him from their gossip and suspicions.
He cared for her, she knew that. Norman V. Mulley, the judge who had presided over Foley’s case at Goshen, likely knew of George Lea’s many objections to this particular young man, as well as the McMahons’ mounting concern for Lena’s involvement with him; yet it would have been natural for Mulley to have compassion for a fellow in a strange town far from home whose actual crimes, all told, had been fairly innocuous. Mulley had devised a judicious compromise, agreeing to set Foley at liberty two months early if he would promise to leave Port Jervis and not return. Foley, in order to gain his freedom, had readily consented. But he then defied the judge’s order and did not leave town; he remained for Lena. He would defy her parents too, if he must.
With the judge’s conditional release hanging over his head, as well as George Lea’s and the McMahons’ disapproval, he and Lena had extra reason to be discreet. To avoid attention, he “introduced her to a back-alley kind of romance,” Bruce Jay Friedman recorded, “and the two were soon meeting behind barns, in cemeteries, and along the banks of the Neversink.”
On Tuesday, May 31, after ordering Foley away, Theresa had struck her daughter across the mouth with such force that, upon leaving the house and walking blindly toward the Erie Depot, Lena had to stop at Luckey’s Pharmacy, on the corner of Front and Fowler, to have her lip dressed. Subsequent events suggest she looked for Foley and, not finding him, left a message for him, perhaps at the pool hall where he worked. She then boarded the 2:28 p.m. train for New York, and from its windows watched the only real home she’d ever known recede from view as the train rumbled over the planks of the Neversink bridge and began its broad left turn toward Otisville.
Lena later described to reporters a most curious journey to New York City, where she would have arrived just after five o’clock. There existed no Hudson River bridges or tunnels at the time, so passengers arriving from Port Jervis detrained at Jersey City and rode an Erie-operated ferry to Lower Manhattan. Once there, Lena recounted, she went up the west side of Manhattan to a friend’s place on Eighty-Sixth Street (by some sort of conveyance, no doubt, as it was a considerable distance) and, failing to find them at home, began walking back downtown in the early evening twilight. The last thing she recalled was entering a dive bar, a “sort of a rough place I noticed after I got inside,” where she asked for and was given a glass of water. Drinking it was her final recollection, for she had no memory of where she spent Tuesday night—“where I was or what I did.” The Gazette concluded that Lena’s “description of her flight to New York City, and her actions while there, would lead one to suppose that the girl had either been temporarily deranged, or that she had been drugged.”
The robbery or abduction of individuals with the use of knockout drops was an infamous New York street crime of the period, so it was not surprising that a reporter trying to deconstruct Lena’s story would suggest it, but there is no evidence that this is what befell Lena. As for where she spent the night, likely it was in Lower Manhattan near the ferry that had initially deposited her there, as she was up early Wednesday morning to recross the Hudson and board Train Number 1 to Port Jervis, arriving there at 12:20 p.m. She had been away less than twenty-four hours.
This rather surreal adventure, as she related it, was reminiscent of her childhood “fit” of 1878, when she mysteriously lost consciousness, fell headlong into a stream, and nearly drowned. If she had not been drugged, or been made temporarily insane by her traumatic departure from her mother’s violence and Port Jervis, why was she unwilling subsequently to reveal her actual movements? Where had she gone, and whom had she seen? Much was inexplicable, yet her curious narrative, as she later told it, became no less clear upon her arrival back in Port Jervis. Here, she claimed to have walked alone to Laurel Grove, where she spent the night among the headstones, before coming to her senses the following morning (Thursday) on the steps of Grace Episcopal Church on East Main Street, close to her parents’ home and a mile from the cemetery.
Foley later shared with newsmen a more believable account of Lena’s return. By prior arrangement, they had met at Fowler and Front about 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, shortly after her train from New York pulled in. She appeared exhausted and somewhat tearful, but with great relief assured him she’d left home for good. “Her mother had abused her terribly,” Foley related, “and [Lena said] that she would not stand it any longer.” Glancing around, they saw there were a lot of people on the street and, thinking it best that they not be seen together, separated after agreeing to meet up again at Carpenter’s Point, the hamlet named for the landmark peninsula and located on the far side of the Neversink. Lena took the more visible route down Main Street while Foley walked along the Erie tracks. The two reunited at the far side of the bridge, then ascended a hill along an old turnpike road into a wooded area where they wouldn’t be disturbed. In this secluded place, Foley later said, they were “as husband and wife, and Lena proved her love to me.”
They remained there until after midnight, then walked back into town. By habit, it seems, they went in the direction of Kingston Avenue, until Lena halted suddenly to remind him she had no intention of going home. Here a crisis presented itself: they had nowhere to go. It’s not clear Foley had any fixed abode that would afford them privacy, and they’d be far too noticeable at a Front Street hotel, and certainly knew it would only cause more trouble if her parents learned he’d brought her somewhere disreputable.
All day they had discussed what to do, but without arriving at any firm resolution. Was Lena really leaving town, breaking from her parents to strike out on her own? Should he go with her? Some of his later statements suggest that Foley had begun to have realistic doubts about their future together, given her parents’ hostility to their relationship and his lack of prospects. Lena, firm in her conviction there was no hope of reconciliation with her mother, continued to insist on her plan. “[Lena] had fully made up her mind by this time to leave home and not have anything more to do with the old people,” Foley recalled, although she now said that, instead of New York, she would go to Boston, where she had relatives.
Just before two o’clock in the morning they paused to rest on the steps of Grace Episcopal Church (here Foley’s version of the story rejoined Lena’s). When Lena complained of feeling faint, Foley went to Bauer’s Hotel on Jersey Avenue, where the café stayed open all night, and returned with two bottles of lemon soda. They sat on the church steps for a half hour longer, then walked across the tracks of the Monticello Line and followed a dirt path to a secluded area along the Neversink where there was a deserted fairgrounds, a harness factory, and a meadow that sloped down to the shore.
Using what extra garments they had and Lena’s meager luggage, the two bedded down to spend the night beneath a chestnut tree, just to the north of where a stream called Cold Brook enters the river. It was the kind of place Stephen Crane would describe as being “well-known and well-traveled by the young people of the village … and cherished … as refuge from the prying supervisory eyes of the adult world.” Since they found so isolated a spot with confidence in the dark, it seems likely they had been there before. Sheltered by a few large trees, the place’s most ideal feature was that just at the edge of the water the land dipped down several feet, creating a smooth grassy ledge that shielded anyone there from view. Secluded, many hundred yards from the nearest dwellings, it was a vagabond lovers’ idyll.
When the sun woke them Thursday morning, Lena wasted no time. She dictated a note for Foley to take to the Erie Depot, authorizing the expressman there to retrieve her belongings from West Street. “Mrs. McMahon,” the message read, “give the bearer my trunk, valise, and package, as they have the articles I need. Unless you will deliver them to the bearer, I will send the sheriff with him. You are nothing more to me. Will write you later. Lena McMahon.”
Foley walked to the Erie and delivered the note to the expressman on duty, Charles Mesler, insisting that under no circumstance was he to reveal to Theresa McMahon that Lena was still in Port Jervis; nor was he to let on that Foley had given him the note, or, as Foley later said, “the jig would be up.” Mesler expressed solidarity with their situation and agreed to help, but said he could not leave his post to go to the McMahons’ until 10:30 a.m. Foley then returned to Lena at the riverfront with some sandwiches and drinks he purchased at Kirk’s, the café at the depot.
The Middletown Daily Times paints a bucolic picture of Lena and Foley passing the morning by the riverside, Foley dozing, Lena reading a book, while children played nearby and a few boys waded in the shallow water to fish. The comforting mix of sun and water, the seductive location, and the laughter of the swimmers upriver surely promoted a sense of well-being, even of possibility. Despite their enormously tangled predicament, the confining strictures of the adult world might, through their own earnest and insistent efforts, yet fall away. They ate and then both drifted back to sleep and did not awaken until well after eleven o’clock. It was about 11:20 a.m., Foley later recalled, when he stood and stretched and announced he would return to the depot to see if Mesler had obtained the trunk. He left Lena alone beneath the chestnut tree, her umbrella lying on its edge nearby to shield her from the sun’s glare.
At the depot Mesler reported that he had gone to West Street as requested and shown Lena’s message to Theresa, but that she refused to hand over the trunk without her husband’s approval. The frosty tone of the note Lena had dictated, with its stiff salutation to “Mrs. McMahon” and the contradictory closing phrases (“You are nothing more to me. Will write you later”) no doubt only further convinced Theresa that her daughter was confused and in turmoil, and precluded her from doing anything rash that would abet Lena’s flight. The expressman advised Foley that if Lena really required the trunk today, the only option was “to go and get the sheriff and take him there and demand the goods.”
“It was left in this way,” Foley remembered. “I was to go back and see the girl and tell her, and we would come down in the afternoon and see about it. As it was a warm day, and as the Monticello train had just backed down, I got into the smoking car and rode up to the depot near the fair grounds.”
A short time after Foley had left the riverside to check in with Mesler, Lena had returned to her book when, she later recounted, “I noticed a shadow cast over my sunshade.” Sitting up abruptly and squinting into the sun, she dimly saw the face of a Black man looming above her in an intrusive manner. He was heavyset, she would remember, and of a light complexion. He spoke before she could: “Why, your mother thinks you are in Middletown.” She later claimed to have never seen the man before, and so the familiarity of his statement was perplexing. It may have occurred to her that he was someone she should know, perhaps one of her customers, but he seemed slightly off, as though he was drunk, or maybe a tramp. “I was terribly frightened,” she said. “He had such an evil look in his eyes.” In an attempt to discourage his lingering any longer, she scoffed at his remark and turned away, but he reacted badly to being dismissed and angrily grabbed her by the shoulders. She screamed, which infuriated him; he clutched her by the neck and covered her mouth with his hand, and “savagely said, ‘Shut up!’”
Hearing her cry of distress and coming on the run was a twelve-year-old white boy named Clarence McKetchnie, who was a neighbor of the McMahons’ and, like all the children in the area, knew Lena as the proprietor of the sweets shop. With his pals Will Miller and Ira Brown, a white and Black boy, respectively, McKetchnie had been heading along Cold Brook toward the river when the man he would later identify as Robert Lewis appeared:
[He was] about a hundred yards ahead of us going toward the bank of the brook where it is the highest. We couldn’t see if there was anyone there, and I don’t believe [he] could either, but he went straight ahead as if he was aiming for something. When he disappeared behind the bank, we heard a woman scream. The other boys ran for help, and I ran toward the place.
When McKetchnie came to the top of the knoll above the chestnut tree, he saw Lewis and Lena struggling near the edge of the water. “Her clothing was torn and the ground was trampled about the place,” he later said. Seeing the boy, Lena implored him, “Help me! Help me!” But, McKetchnie reported, Lewis gestured menacingly toward his pistol pocket and warned him not to come near. Then, abruptly, the attacker stood up, gathered some fishing gear he had with him, and went away, while Lena lay perfectly still on the ground. “I thought she was dead,” McKetchnie said.
It is not clear whether Lena was sexually molested or how long she and her attacker tussled before help arrived. In later remarks she was demure about the matter, as she would have been expected to be, but did not dispute the assertion made by others, including her physician, that the assault she had endured was sexual in intent. Numerous witnesses who saw her in the immediate aftermath of the incident said her face was bleeding and her clothes were torn, the condition McKetchnie said he found Lena in as he assisted her to her feet and led her to the top of the bank. “Then I called [to] some factory girls and left her with them, while I went and got her mother.”
The young women, teenage harness-factory workers who had been taking their lunch in a nearby grove, later testified that a light-skinned Black man had passed them as he headed to where Lena was sitting, and that he had glanced them over and commented, “You look like a lot of chippies.” The recollection of the young women—Katie Burke, Katie and Ida Balmos, Mary Jane Clark, Nellie Stines, Jennie Banigan, and Katie Judge—as summarized by Burke at the coroner’s inquest, was that the man had actually been in the company of McKetchnie, Miller, and Brown when he’d passed. Subsequent testimony would suggest it was plausible the boys had shown Lewis where Lena was seated by the river.
The factory girls also said that when they first heard Lena’s screams from the direction of the water, they assumed they were the sounds of those same three boys swimming and frolicking; they grew concerned, however, when it became apparent they were hearing a woman plead for help. “We found her leaning against a tree and looking exhausted,” Burke stated. “We fixed up her hair and dress which were disarranged.” Lena told them a Black man had jumped her and had “tried to tear her tongue out.”
Foley, meanwhile, who had hitched a ride back to the riverside aboard the Monticello train, had just reached the brow of a hill and started to walk down when he caught sight of Lena standing with a group of young women he did not know. Lena saw him and beckoned for him to come down, but he hesitated, fearful, he explained later, that the scene had something to do with her mother, so Lena walked up the hill to where he was. “He seemed unsurprised by her condition,” according to the factory girls. “He took her aside and whispered to her.” Lena told him of the assault, although, in Foley’s recollection, she did not act as though the incident was anything serious and, out of modesty, forbade him from asking for details. When Foley inquired if she knew who had attacked her, she replied, “No, I do not; but I am sure I could identify him if he were here.” Lena never suggested, as did the factory girls, that the Black stranger had been with McKetchnie and his friends, but she told Foley she believed the boys knew who he was.
“We then went to the river,” Foley recounted, “where I washed her face with her handkerchief. I did not think there were many scratches on her face.”
To the factory girls Lena seemed “very much excited,” but refused their suggestion that she go home. According to Burke, Foley was calm about the situation and instructed them, “Well, girls, you go, and keep this secret and don’t tell anyone, and I’ll try to find out who the negro was.” She later testified: “We did not know Foley, but we saw that Lena did, and supposing that it was right, came away.”
McKetchnie’s companions, however, Miller and Brown, had already roused the neighborhood. One of the first people to arrive on the scene was Sol Carley, a twenty-four-year-old railroad flagman who was the McMahons’ neighbor and friend—and in the view of at least one newspaper, “an admirer of Miss McMahon.” He found Foley holding Lena’s umbrella over her. She appeared much distressed and was crying, while one of the young women tried to soothe her by brushing and braiding her hair. In Carley’s wake came several older women from the neighborhood, who remonstrated with Lena to return home. Foley, knowing Lena’s determination to leave Port Jervis, argued against it, but “soon after I saw her mother coming,” he recalled. “Not wishing to meet her, for I knew it would not be a pleasant one, I withdrew. [Lena] seemed to be all right then and walked about with apparent ease.” Hanging back and making himself as invisible as possible, he went with the group as far as the Monticello track, then quietly split off and followed the rails back to the village.
After Carley, Theresa, and the others had walked Lena to her house and a doctor was summoned, Carley returned alone to the riverside to look for Lena’s assailant. Known as “Cool-Headed Carley” for his prowess on the baseball diamond, the young man was himself no stranger to life-or-death crises: nine summers earlier he had accidentally shot himself in the breast while cleaning a revolver on the back stoop of his father’s house. The bullet had missed his heart by a centimeter, and his survival was ever after recalled in the neighborhood as a kind of miracle.
Like Lena, Carley suspected the light-skinned man was a tramp who might have come off the nearby railroad or was living in the woods. He devoted much of the afternoon to searching the area, but failing to find the man or learn anything about him, he retreated to Gilbert’s Store, a popular gathering spot on the corner of Kingston and Spruce. There he found a group of men and boys gossiping about the incident. Among them was the boy Miller, who was in the midst of recounting a particularly interesting detail: just before the attack, he and Brown had been hanging out at the small Monticello Depot on East Main with several neighborhood boys, as well as Robert Lewis. Miller had mentioned then that he’d seen Mrs. McMahon earlier that morning substituting for Lena at the store, and that when he’d idly asked after Lena, the mother explained she had gone to Middletown. Right then, someone else in the group of boys had spoken up to say that was unlikely, as they’d seen Lena only a short time before, down by the shore where Cold Brook entered the Neversink. Upon hearing this news, claimed Miller to the group at Gilbert’s, Lewis had stood up and, looking perturbed, gone off in that direction.
The gathering at the store was shortly joined by John Doty, a carpenter and neighborhood regular. After greeting everyone, he sought out Carley. “Do you want to catch the n*****?” he asked. Carley assured him that he did. Doty said a light-skinned Black man had been spotted on the towpath of the D&H Canal, heading north.