Photo: Blennerhassett Mansion Gate Stones

Photographer: J. J. Prats
Taken: August 13, 2022
Caption: Blennerhassett Mansion Gate Stones
Additional Description: On display at the Blennerhassett Museum in Parkersburg proper. This museum card reads, “These stones are all that remains of the original gate constructed by Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett to their island estate circa 1800.”
A nearby card continues,

The gateway consisted of two tall square-cut pillars of stone between which extended a double wrought iron gate. A flight of cut stone steps stretched from the gate down the island’s bank to the water’s—a distance of over thirty feet. The gate and stairs together formed the formal entrance to the Blennerhassett mansion. For the convenience of their guests, the Blennerhassetts operated a ferry boat, rowed by their slave Moses, that ran across the Ohio from the gate to the Belpre shore.

After the Blennerhassetts fled downriver in December 1806, their estate fell into neglect and then ruin. When a United States Army wife named Lydia Bacon visited the island in 1811, she wrote in her diary that the gateway “was choked by bushes.” Gradually, a number of the fine cut stone were removed by unknown persons to be used in the construction of buildings in the area. Sometime later in the 19th century, what remained of the gate stones were carried over to the site of the right wing building the mansion (which had burned to the ground in 1811) and utilized as steps for a small house that had been built there in 1834. Toward the end of the 1800s, as interest increased in preserving Blennerhassett relics, the gate stones were gathered up once more and stacked against a nearby tree. An iron cage-like barrier was placed around the stones to protect them from being chipped away by souvenir hunters.

Here the gate stones remained until 1984 when they were removed and replaced in storage on the island. (This was necessitated by the start of reconstruction of the Blennerhassett mansion on the site.) In 1990, for their better preservation and in order that the public could view them, these priceless relics were transported to Parkersburg and put on exhibit in the Blennerhassett Museum.

Submitted: August 21, 2022, by J. J. Prats of Powell, Ohio.
Database Locator Identification Number: p673809
File Size: 7.188 Megabytes

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