An Irishman’s Diary about a Kerryman’s legacy to West Virginia

On the banks of the Ohio

Among the residents of Mark Twain’s summer home, in a forested area of upstate New York, was a colony of squirrels. They were all but pets, joining the writer (uninvited) for tea every afternoon at a table in the woods where he worked. And maybe it was because they were red squirrels, suggesting Celtic forbears, that Twain gave them all the same name, “Blennerhassett”. Kerry people may suspect a link here, their county being home to a small but sturdy population of human Blennerhassetts. And they’d be right. Expanding on the squirrels in one of his letters, Twain explained that he’d named them after “Burr’s friend”, the Burr in question being Aaron Burr, third vice-president of the US.

Harman Blennerhassett seems to have disappeared without trace from Irish history, but he remains an indelible footnote to the story of early American independence, thanks to the same Burr.

He was born, in fact, in England – 250 years ago today, by some accounts – before the family moved back to Kerry, where they had a vast estate near Killorglin. The young Blennerhassett went to Trinity College, studied law, and like many of his generation joined the United Irishmen.

But it was a revolution elsewhere that led him to the first of two fateful twists. In 1794 he was sent to terror-struck France to rescue a woman called Margaret Agnew, with whom he fell in love. The love was in some ways understandable. She was by all accounts beautiful, charming, and of high intelligence. Unfortunately she was also his sister’s daughter.

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And it was as much to escape the family’s disapproval of the relationship, as to flee the violent unravelling of the United Irishmen movement, that the couple left Ireland in 1796, to start a new life in what is now West Virginia. At first they concentrated their energies there on creating a new home, on an island in the Ohio river. They commissioned “the grandest building west of the Appalachians”, and filled it with the finest furnishings.

But there appears to have been something of Lady Macbeth in Margaret Blennerhasset (as she was now), whose ambitions for her husband were greater than his own. And when the aforementioned Burr started to make regular visits, seeking a financial backer, an opportunity for a bigger role in American life presented itself.

Burr’s term as vice-president was by then over. So, thanks to the infamous 1804 duel with Alexander Hamilton, was his political career. Seeking new opportunities, he thought he’d found them on the southern fringes of the young United States. His story was that he was trying to establish an enormous farm there in the Spanish-held territories of Texas and Mexico. The view from Washington was different. He was subsequently tried for treason in attempting to set up an independent country.

The case was dismissed, eventually, and historians still differ about his true intentions. But whatever he was doing, his friends from Kerry were deeply implicated. Their river island had been the base for Burr’s operations and was seized. Although Blennerhassett too was exonerated, the bill for the adventure and subsequent legal costs ruined him.

Having no other options, the couple returned to Europe and lived their remaining days in relative poverty. But according to Tom Jewett, an Illinois academic to whose account of the saga I’m indebted, they retain “almost cult status” in the Ohio River Valley, drawing thousands of visitors to their restored home on what is now “Blennerhassett Island”.

Getting back to Mark Twain’s humorous echo of the story, that too had a comic sequel, set in a London courtroom in 1932. It was during the yo-yo craze and centred on a newspaper ad, warning of the toy’s addictive nature. The cautionary tale was a fictional “Mr Blennerhassett” of “Throgmorton Street” (London’s financial district), who had been “as worthy a citizen as any that ever ate lobster at Pimm’s” until a yo-yo habit sent him mad.

Apparently the copywriter was a Twain fan, who also liked the Kerry name. But it so happened that there was an actual stockbroker on Throgmorton Street called Blennerhassett who occasionally ate lobster at Pimm’s and had no sense of humour. He sued.

His performance on the stand began badly when counsel put it to him that Blennerhassett was a “very well-known Irish name”, to which the indignant witness replied: “Certainly not, it’s English.” The lawyer mock-apologised for casting “aspersions”, then continued to skewer his man on everything from his lobster-eating habits to his unfamiliarity with yo-yos. And to cut a long story short, Mr Blennerhassett was laughed out of court.