Mahon Deffier Farm

The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Jane (Elsie) Mahon, 1899-1995 

Prepared by Robert (Bob) Doherty for the McNally Family Reunion, Drumshanbo and Cavan,  Ireland, July–August 2026. 

Preface 

In preparing this narrative of Elsie and Jack Doherty, Bob quotes extensively from Elsie’s  own handwritten recollections as recorded in 1994, My Memories, A Written Record of My  Life and Times to Hand Down to My Family (unpublished), and from the written  recollections of Jack. 

Italicized notes below are in Elsie’s or Jack’s own words. 

Like any first and second-hand accounts based on recollections from long ago, there will  be inaccuracies, and their impressions of people and places may be different than those of  other family members. 

[We fact-checked marriages, deaths, ship manifests and other key dates and events to the  extent possible through research Bob’s wife, Liz Doherty, compiled through Ancestry.com.  We will gladly share them with any of you interested].  

Overview 

This is the story of Eliza (Elsie) Mahon (Doherty), grandmother of Patricia (Pat), Robert  (Bob), and Kathleen (Kathy) Doherty, and Erin Rose (formerly Doherty). It is also the story of  her son and our father, John (Jack) Doherty, her only child. 

Elsie was born on February 5, 1899, to Elizabeth (Eliza/Liza) McManus and Joseph Mahon,  in Diffier, Drumshanbo, County Leirim, the fifth of eight children. Her life spanned nearly a  century of the Irish immigrant experience, from growing up poor on a family farm in Leitrim,  

Ireland; joining in Ireland’s war of independence from Britain; raising a son, our father,  mostly on her own; emigrating twice from Ireland to the United States; and owning and  running a neighborhood bar in Woodside, Queens, New York. She died on May 4, 1995, at age 96. 

Elsie raised Jack as a single mom in Ireland while her husband and his father, Thomas  (Tom) Doherty was away in America. She cared for Jack as they crossed the ocean from Ireland to America and back —two times—when he was just an infant and young boy,  traveling in steerage each time. 

She supported him when they finally moved—for good—from Ireland to New York to be with  Tom Doherty.

They worked together at Doherty’s Bar for 32 years.  

They were as close as any parent and child can be. 

While this is only a small part of the Mahon story, we hope it captures what it was like to be  a young Irish woman and her son crossing over from a poor, agrarian, and traditional  society to a bustling American city embracing modernity. 

It is not only her story and legacy, it is all of ours. 

Pat, Bob, Kathy and Erin 

Family Life in Drumshandbo, Leitrim, Early 20th Century 

Elsie: 

There were eight in my father’s family. My father was the youngest so he got the old home. My father went to America to pay off all the debt [from paying for his parents’ and several  siblings’ funerals] and was there for ten years before he came home. We were very poor. When he returned from America he was a road contractor and broke all the stones with a  hammer, it was a tough job. I always helped him because he promised to buy me a bike which he did and I had a great time going to all the sports. 

My mother was always cooking, baking, sewing. She baked 8- stone of oatmeal every  month [and] made all of our clothes from hand me downs. Mother played the Melodeon  and always enjoyed when we took our friends home and she would play all our favorite  tunes. 

We used to have a lot of parties in our house. We would dance all night and the ashes and  fire would be blowing all over the house. We also had a gramophone with a big horn and 10  records, a cousin of Mother’s, a Yankee, gave it to us as a present. We never knew we were  poor because my mother managed to try and do everything for us. 

Jack: 

Joseph Mahon’s farm was twenty-six acres... only the four near the house were fertile. [It]  supplied enough food for the members of the family including the farm animals—some pigs, a  couple of cows, a plow horse, jackass, and ducks, chickens and geese. But not enough was  grown to be sold and that is why our ancestors were so poor. The work was manual. It was  backbreaking drudgery. The principal crops were potatoes and oats. Life was hard. Still, all were  well-fed and the children grew up healthy and strong. 

[The family lived in a] Thatched cottage with whitewashed outside walls. On the ground floor  was the kitchen with a fireplace—one bedroom and a parlor. The parlor was reserved for special  occasions only—Christmas or visitors other than neighbors; its fireplace was never lighted except 

then. [There was] no indoor plumbing or electricity. The only heat in the entire house was from  the fireplace in the kitchen. As a result, the walls in all the rooms were constantly damp from all  the wetness. 

The three rooms upstairs were bedrooms where the boys slept. Grandfather Joseph and  grandmother Liza slept in the unheated bedroom downstairs. The girls slept in a settle bed in the  kitchen near the fireplace. A settle bed was no more than a feather-stuffed mattress enclosed by  foot boards on all sides. The roof of our thatched house was raised and a slate roof put on in the  1930s—while I lived there—with a grant from the Irish free state government. 

Mary Marcellina’s Goodbye and an American Wake 

Elsie’s sister Mary Marcellina Mahon [later McNally], six years older than Elsie, emigrated to  the United States in 1910 at age 17. Like most immigrants of those times, she never  returned. 

Elsie writes of Mary’s departure: 

Our neighbors would come and stay up all night when Mary was going to America... Mother  playing the Melodeon …everyone singing sad songs all night. And in the morning everyone  would walk down the road and say goodbye for the last time. That happened with everyone  who went to America, it was always so sad. I shall never forget Mother crying because she  never seen them again [sic]. And it was always called the American Wake. 

Jack: 

Mary was the first to get the American Wake. Grandfather [Joseph Mahon] sent the money  over for her passage. Elsie, at age 95, still cries with the bitter memory of her mother’s cries  saying goodbye to Mary.  

It was the same as a death because their parents would never see them again. There were  no planes, telephones, no modern means for families to communicate with each other  than a rare letter or two. Because the trips back and forth were so costly and Irish  immigrants seldom had the time or money to return for a visit, once they left for America it  was a final goodbye. 

Mary married William Joseph McNally in 1919. 

[Mary did visit Drumshanbo later in life when her brother Tom was still alive]. Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921

The Mahons put their lives on the line in the Irish Republican Army’s war to free Ireland from  British rule.  

Jack: 

County Leitrim was one of the counties where the English sent the Black and Tans because  of the resistance of the people. A surprise raid [of our Mahon farm] found Tom Mahon  home. The British soldiers dragged him from the house, beat him with rifle butts and threw  him in the pond near the road. They kept beating him and they probably would have killed  him if our grandmother Liza didn’t scream and throw herself into the pond to save her son. A  British soldier hit her once but was told to stop by his officer. Uncle Tom suffered from  headaches and a scalp rash all the days of his life. 

Elsie did not want to go to America... the principal reason was the good job she had... as  the county Relief Officer and Cottage Rent Collector. She got this [elected] job by defeating  three male candidates. Her popularity was due to the role she played in the war against the  Black and Tan [British soldiers], carrying messages to and from IRA soldiers fighting the  British and for what she did in the Irish Civil War. 

In the Irish Civil War, 1922–1923, the Mahons fought against the treaty with Britain  negotiated by IRA leader Michael Collins and ratified on January 7, 1922, creating the new  Irish Free State. They could not accept that it kept Ulster under British rule even as it gained  independence for much of Ireland. 

Jack: 

Elsie was asked to find out the name of a sentry guarding the Free State headquarters in  town. But something came up and she couldn’t do the job and asked [sister] Rose to do it  and she did. Some hours later the sentry was killed by the IRA. Rose always felt she was the  cause. She wasn’t but that didn’t do anything to ease her mind. 

[Brother] Packy Mahon joined the IRA during the civil war and was taken prisoner by the  Free State. He was badly treated while in prison . . .with many beatings and psychological  abuse. They would be taken out by a firing squad, blindfolded, and stood up against a wall.  They would hear ‘ready, aim, fire’ and then the click of empty guns. 

The civil war ended in 1923 with the defeat of the anti-treaty IRA. To the end of her life, Elsie  would cry bitterly over the Leitrim men she knew who lost their lives in the war.  

Marriage, Motherhood and Emigration 

Elsie had no intention of emigrating to the United States—until she met Thomas (Tom)  Doherty. Tom emigrated from Leitrim to New York City in 1915, returning home for a visit in  1926, bringing marriage and motherhood to Elsie.

Jack: 

Grandmother Eliza had Tom [Mahon] and Elsie living on the farm with her so she was not  left alone to sink into despair over thoughts of all her loved one gone never to return. [But  then] “Tom Doherty returned for a brief visit and swept Elsie off her feet with his fancy  clothes and his smart Yankee ways. After a brief courtship, they were married [on  November 29, 1925]. He returned to America [on June 13, 1926], leaving Elsie six months  pregnant with me. He sent for us a year after I was born. [Elsie emigrated with Jack on  September 26, 1927, reuniting with husband Tom]. Grandmother Liza screamed bitterly at  my mother when she went down the lane with me in her arms. Elsie cries and cries  whenever she has to tell of my Grandmother’s pain. Eliza died a year after Elsie emigrated,  never to see her again. She was 59 years old. 

The 1930 U.S. Census records that Tom, Elsie and Jack lived in Queens, NYC and that Tom  worked as a laborer. 

Jack: 

My father and uncles [Tom Doherty’s brothers] were sandhogs. An Irish job no others cared  to apply. They shoveled under the riverbeds of New York City in the wet darkness of the  tunnel. It was a dehumanizing job if there ever was one. When it was time to be lifted up to  ground level, they had to go into decompression chambers to prevent getting “the bends.”  My father got a lucky break. The break was in his left hand. Bones smashed. He had to have  the middle finger amputated. This ended his sandhog days. He worked on and off as a cab  driver [and] a bartender... 

Return to Leitrim 

Elsie and Jack remained with husband Tom in New York for only a few short years, returning  to Drumshanbo without him in 1930 (exact date uncertain), when our dad was between 3  and 4 years old. The circumstances of their return are unclear. My father told us for years  that his father, unable to support them, sent them back to Ireland. Later in life, he said Elsie  was the one who decided to return to Ireland. 

For the next six years, she was a single mother to my father, living in the thatched cottage of  her childhood with her brother Tom and their father. 

Jack recalled those days as among the happiest of his life: 

I loved going hunting with my dog Smokey chasing rabbits but never catching any. But we  didn’t care! We were together jumping over this and that, free on our own and away from

grownups. I loved going barefoot as much as possible even though I got stone bruises,  thorns in my feet, and other sores from not wearing shoes.  

But life in other ways was difficult. 

The winters were long, cold and dismally wet and hard living both inside and outside the  thatched cottage for all of us.  

Those days were the hardest working time of my life. I had to get the eggs from the hens in  the henhouse. They never took kindly to that. They would hit me in the head with their wings  and their feathers flew about making me choke. I hated the hens! Another job was my  having to take a pail out in the rain and cold to fill it with water from a rain barrel alongside  the house, but the hardest job was helping my mother plant the eyes of potatoes in the turf.  My mother carried a long pole to put slits in the turf. It was my job to put the eyes in the slits  and turn them over. And sure, my poor back hurt from all that bending down and getting up.  Another job was milking the cow. I helped my mother churn the milk to make buttermilk and  butter. Another sore job for my body.” 

Back to America 

During those years, Elsie never heard from husband Tom, and it seemed like they would  remain in Ireland permanently without him. But Tom finally wrote to her (late 1935 or early  1936) inviting her to rejoin him in New York. She agreed, and Elsie and Jack returned to New  York on March 10, 1936. 

Jack:  

We left the farm and I rode on a train for the first time to the town where our ship was  docked. I saw the ocean for the first time, amazed at seeing so much water. My mother and  I walked around town before boarding and I saw electric lights in a building [also] for the  first time, I wondered how there was light when there wasn’t a lamp with a wick. 

All I remember about the trip across the ocean was that we were in steerage and the smell  of the galley, near our tiny stateroom, nauseated me. I got seasick and the pounding of the  ship’s pumps was very loud and hurt my ears. I remember I didn’t like being at sea and I  wished I was back on the farm with my dog Smokey running the fields again. 

Life in New York and Doherty’s Bar 

My father found it hard to adjust to his new life in New York. Uprooted from a family farm in  rural Ireland where he was free to roam, young Jack now lived in a boisterous and loud city,  knowing only his mother. He had to learn city ways and gain acceptance from American  classmates. He resented having to live with a father he did not know, in a city that scared him. 

They lived in a tenement with two of his father’s brothers. Times were hard, with Tom working  as a taxi driver and bartender and Elsie as a maid. 

Tom’s purchase of a bar changed their lives. 

Jack: 

[My father] begged, borrowed and saved enough money to buy a bar on the corner of 65th  Street and 39th Avenue in Woodside. [The bar opened on June 4, 1941]. 

The price of a bar in those years was $100 for every $100 of weekly business. So the seller, Hank  O'Leary, was paid $1700. Again my father got lucky. Six months after buying the bar the U.S. was at war. Soon there was work for everyone not going into the service. 

The Depression was over! Business picked up. Prospered.  

Sadly, my father didn’t live long enough to enjoy this. He died of a stroke in February 1944 at the  age of 47. My mother took over. With only a 3rd grade education, she didn't think she could do  it. But she wanted to keep the business for me in case I couldn't make it on my own. Five years  later that proved how smart she was. Elsie Doherty discovered she had a knack for business. 

I became the day bartender in 1949. Three years later I got married. My mother gave us the bar  and the building for a wedding present. She had bought the building in 1948 despite the worry  of taking on so much with no money to speak of. It had the bar, two other stores, three four room apartments over them above what was to become a dentist's office. 

The bar wasn't doing much business by 1952. But marriage settled me down. My mother and I  became a great team. I learned to treat customers nicely and the day business grew. My mother  was the official greeter at night. More women became customers which attracted more men.  The women knew that Elsie Doherty would make sure no men would bother them unless they  wanted to be bothered. 

For more than 30 years, our father worked behind the bar six days a week, working four 10 hour  day shifts (8 am to 6 pm), one night shift (6 pm to 4 am) and one 6 hour Sunday day shift (noon  to 6 pm), with only Tuesday and Sunday morning off. Elsie, who lived in a walk-up apartment  above the bar, would tend bar when he took a short lunch break and manage it when he was  away. 

One night in 1968, Jack’s first cousin Frances McNally, daughter of Tom Doherty’s sister Bridget  (Bridey) (Doherty) McPartland, came by the bar to visit Jack and Elsie. Another of Jack’s first  cousins, Ed McNally, son of Mary Marcellina [Mahon] and William Joseph McNally, was also at  the bar. With matchmaking in mind, Elsie asked Ed to walk Frances home that evening. It  worked, and Ed and Frances got married in Ireland in January 1969. Their children are the  closest living genetic relatives to Pat, Kathy, Erin and me, other than us to each other. Frances, 

Ed and “the boys”—Mark, Neal, Jamie and Michael—would visit us on Christmas Day for many  years. 

While on college breaks in the summers of 1976–77, I became the third generation of Doherty  men to work behind the bar, an eye-opening experience for a suburban college kid serving blue  collar customers. I made good money on tips, but the best part is I got to know Elsie so much  better. She did her best to teach me how to do the job well, what to know about each regular  customer, how to make sure their glasses never were empty, how to give and spread attention,  and occasionally, how to defuse a difficult encounter—while regaling me with her wit and  stories. 

While in his 40s, our father enrolled in college night classes while still tending bar, getting a  bachelor’s and then master’s degree, and a teaching certificate. 

He sold Doherty’s Bar in 1978. Part of the reason is that business was down because of  demographic changes in the neighborhood, as it had become predominantly Latino. But more  than that, he had intended for years to sell it and become a teacher once he completed his  education. He wanted to give back to children who had grown up poor like him. He taught at  James Madison Public High School in Brooklyn to a largely Haitian student body, poor immigrants as he had been. 

The Rest of Elsie’s Story 

Elsie was a wonderful grandmother, bringing treats, cooking Irish dinners for our family in her  apartment, and showing a genuine interest in us. She wanted us to know our Irish heritage. One  of my favorite memories is when she took me to Ireland (my first visit) at age 14 to visit our  relatives and see where she and our dad grew up. I met her brother, Tom Mahon and his wife  Peggy, who lived in Carrick-on-Shannon, a few miles from Drumshanbo. Uncle Tom took me  angling on the Shannon River and introduced me to local lads.  

I had read up on Irish history before my flight to Ireland (yes, at age 14) and expressed my  opinion to Uncle Tom that Michael Collins was right to sign the treaty with Britain. He turned  bright red, passionately told me why I was wrong. While I didn’t persuade him (of course not),  he smiled and said I was a good gossom (Irish expression of endearment). 

Well into her 80s, Elsie would sit at a bar stool at an Irish bar near our family house on Long  Island, laughing and joking with the Irish-born proprietor. She loved going to bars to listen to  traditional Irish musicians, especially when they’d play “Lovely Leitrim” at her request. 

In 1995, Jack and our mother Marilyn moved to Reston, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, to  be closer to family. It was the first time in their lives that Elsie and Jack did not live near or with  each other. Our dad called her regularly and visited her in New York.

Elsie remained at the walk-up apartment above what had been Doherty’s Bar (then and to this  day a Latino bar), until having to move into a nursing home at age 95 following a fall. 

Elsie died in her sleep in Far Rockaway, New York on May 4, 1995, age 96.  She leaves us all with a legacy of a truly remarkable life.