Port Jervis is a small city where New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey meet. The city has 8,775 residents according to the 2020, down by more than a thousand since the 1920s. The area is frequently hailed for its beauty, being surrounded by foothills of the Appalachian Mountains with the Delaware River flowing south of the city and the Neversink River flowing into the Delaware.
A small settlement during the Colonial Period, the settlement was nearly whipped out during the Revolutionary War. In 1828, the Delaware and Hudson Canal was opened to provide transit for Pennsylvania coal through the area to the Hudson River and then down to New York City. Port Jervis saw steady growth in the decades before the Civil War as this became an important port on the canal. In 1851, the Erie Railroad opened a track linking Port Jervis with the emerging railroads spreading across the country. Many railroad workers made their home in Port Jervis. This later became the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. The first train to enter Port Jervis carried President Millard Fillmore, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, General Winfield Scott, and Senator William H. Seward.
Many men from Port Jervis joined the Orange Blossom Regiment, the 124th New York Volunteer Regiment, during the Civil War.
In the rainy morning, I looked up at the monument. It is forty-five feet tall with flag bearer at the top of the column. The monument was designed by Eleazer Frederick Carr of Quincy, Massachusetts firm of Frederick and Field and sculpted by Edward King.
At the base are four designs showing the different services of the Union.
Diana Farnum was born Diana Zearfoss in Warren County, New Jersey on May 16, 1815. She married George Farnum an d lived in Otsego, N.Y. until her husband died. Then she moved to Port Jervis to be near her son, the editor of the Union newspaper. In 1875, she married her ailing brother-in-law Henry Farnum who passed away five days after the marriage. She was now rich. She left $8,000 dollars in her will, about $200,000 in 2022 dollars, to erect the memorial to the Civil War veterans from Orange County. Her sons contributed another thousand dollars.
The memorial is dedicated to the veterans who “AIDED IN PRESERVING THE UNION AND IN SECURING EQUALITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS FOR ALL.” As I have seen in several monuments in the Northeast, preserving the Union was coupled with ending slavery. What is interesting here is the monument goes beyond that by heralding the “equality” of “human rights for all.” A half-decade later, human rights would plainly not be honored for one Black man in Port Jervis.
Stephen Crane may have been influenced by another event in Port Jervis. He wrote a story called “The Monster” about a Black man cast out by white society. Critics say that he was influenced to write this because of the 1892 lynching of Robert Lewis. Approximately 2,000 people watched as the Black man was executed by a mob of whites.
In that case, Robert Lewis was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman on June 2, 1892.
After the Robert Lewis Lynching, there was continued action by white supremacists in the city. For instance, the Evening Gazette from September 4, 1924 reported that 300 Klansmen paraded through the streets of the town. The parade had Klansmen from “nearly every town in the county,” and included some Klansmen from New Jersey and Pennsylvania as well. The Klansmen were accompanied on their march by three bands as well as police and state troopers. The newspaper said that several thousand people lined the streets to witness the parade. While some cheered the Klan, there were several “boos.” In 1923, the Klan celebrated the Republicans having won the mayoral election in Port Jervis after they had endorsed the Republican candidate. In May of 1923 there was a Klan initiation on a farm outside of Port Jervis where a reported hundred Klansmen were sworn in.
What was interesting about this second iteration of the Klan is that its geography and politics had expanded. The First Klan had been almost exclusively a Southern phenomenon (with certain exceptions) and it had formed a political alliance with the Democratic Party in most Southern states. It focused its violence on African Americans and the Republican Party. During the the Second Klan phase in the 1910s and 1920s the targets had been expanded to Blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, labor organizers, and Socialists. The Klan did reemerge in the Democratic Party, but it saw its greatest expansion in the Republican Party in the North.
All color photos taken by Pat Young.
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Thank you for this feature. While there is absolutely no verifiable proof that Stephen Crane spoke with Civil War veterans in the Orange Square park highlighted in this piece or, for that matter, anywhere else, his time as a youth in Port Jervis and later returns as a young adult would have made it impossible for him to avoid crossing paths with former soldiers whose company he keenly sought. A map showing his Port Jervis residences, those of Civil War veterans, and relevant locations is here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1viGCxVFXRliPxr_xyr2bP9YdKfg&usp=sharing
In many ways Port Jervis was and is a microcosm of Colonial era America and United States history. One distinction it may have from what became the non-slave holding states was the degree of racial animus it held towards those of African descent.
Unknown and perhaps willfully hidden or forgotten until accidentally being discovered while doing research on Stephen Crane, was a remote segregated community of color adjoining Port Jervis just outside the Village’s boundary. Popularly referred to as N****r Hollow, this settlement is known to have existed from 1863 until it was mandatorily relocated in 1883 to another adjoining but again relatively isolated area where it remained at least until the early 1960s.
Among the original Hollow’s residents listed in the 1880 U.S. Census was Robert Jackson, an alternate name used by the 1892 lynching victim, Robert Lewis, which reflected the surname of his Civil War veteran step-father, Henry Jackson. The animus was captured well in this October 1883 news article reporting on the relocation which invoked the “children of Ham” biblical reference frequently used in the Confederate states as a justification for slavery. (pg 1, col. 4) https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=teg18831025-01.1.1&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN———-
Stephen might very well have regularly seen people of color walking up the main route to the original Hollow via Orange Street which intersected the short, one block long Brooklyn Street where he lived from the summer of 1880 until the summer of 1883. Those passing by may have included Civil War veteran Samuel Hasbrouck whose face was disfigured following the 1879 accidental discharge of a cannon intended to announce the arrival of Independence Day that occurred when Crane lived in the Drew Methodist Church parsonage located only about three blocks away. Hasbrouck became a known personality and would have also been a resident when Stephen returned to Port Jervis as a young adult. The possibility of Crane using his creative genius to reimagine Hasbrouck in The Monster as Henry Johnson, a name similar to his step-father, Henry Jackson, does not seem unreasonable.
Port Jervis also had a very robust participation in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan movement which reached its zenith in 1924 marked by a torch carrying parade of 300 that culminated with festivities held at a river front park only a few blocks from the community’s oldest Black church and its largely African American neighborhood. Here is a scanned historic newspaper documenting the march. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=teg19240904-01.1.1&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN———-
There are other relevant factors tending to support the particular racial animus once held in Port Jervis but these alone may provide insights into the community’s social environment that nurtured the fervor which led to the horrific June 2, 1892 mob lynching of Robert Lewis on Main Street – literally within shouting distance of the home of Stephen’s lawyer brother, William, who was among those few whose heroic efforts to save Lewis proved in vain.
We are preparing the article for next week.