[4] According to the Boston Daily Globe, Puryear was one of numerous Black Southerners who had recently moved north to work on the railroad and lingered after the track's completion, "encamped as tramps near the towns along its route."

[5] In the village of Tannersville on the evening of February 23, 1894, a middle-aged white storekeeper by the name of Christian Ehlers invited Richard Puryear into his house to discuss "commonplace matters."

Papers reported that the mob was led by neighbors of the Ehlers, but two ringleaders named by The New York Times, merchant James W. Wilson and farmer Luther M. Michaels, lived in Mount Pocono and Shawnee, miles from the scene of the tragedy.

[6] During the night of March 14, Puryear jimmied the door of his cell and slipped into the jail corridor, where he hid in an empty room until Sheriff Kresge arrived in the morning to deliver breakfast to the prisoners.

The fugitive then dashed through the sheriff's kitchen and out of the jail and sprinted through vacant lots and streets crowded with men heading to work, seeking to escape into the woods outside Stroudsburg.

Kuenton, a tall and strong man armed with a revolver given him by his employer, captured Puryear and marched him back to his pursuers, whose ranks had swollen to between 50 and 200 men.

"[1] Members of the mob swiftly procured a block and tackle used to hoist slaughtered cattle, mounting the device onto a stout white oak or maple tree near the creek.

Dozens of men seized the end of the stout sixty-foot length of manila rope and hoisted Puryear into the air so sharply that his head smashed into a tree limb, possibly rendering him unconscious, as he went limp instantly.

[1][5][9][8] At ten o'clock, almost three hours after the lynching, Monroe County authorities finally ordered the rope cut and the body transported to the jail.

[8][9][10] Residents of Stroudsburg objected to burying Puryear in the town cemetery,[9] so according to an account in the Pocono Record, "the body was sent by express to George Willet, Philadelphia, to be used at the University of Pennsylvania for dissecting purposes"[8] on March 17.

[4] Despite scores of witnesses to the lynching, on March 17, a Stroudsburg coroner's jury brought in a verdict of death by hanging committed by persons unknown.

A Stroudsburg newspaper, the Jeffersonian, blamed the murder on "a few hot-headed youths and weak-minded men [who] unwittingly inaugurated the Southern and border civilization in our midst."

The Philadelphia Inquirer lauded the Jeffersonian's editors for demonstrating the difference "between Northern and Southern civilization" through its "courageous" stance, in contrast with the tendency in the South to downplay and justify lynching.

[17] The New York Press denounced the lynching of a "helpless prisoner" in the heart of a "highly civilized commonwealth," especially when there was "no fear of a miscarriage of justice" given the strength of the evidence against Puryear.