The frontier contained hosts of lawless men, men to whom loyalty meant license.  Three days after the conversation described, word was brought to the island that a party of the Wood County militia, made up of the lowest and most brutal men in the community, would land on the island that very night, seize the boats, arrest all the men they found, and probably burn the house.

The danger was imminent.  Blennerhasset and all the men with him took to the boats to escape arrest and possibly murder from these exasperated frontiersmen.  Mrs. Blennerhasset and her children were left in the mansion, with the expectation that their presence would restrain the brutality of the militia, and preserve the house and its valuable contents from destruction.  It proved a fallacious hope.  Colonel Phelps, the commander of the militia, pursued Blennerhasset.  In his absence his men behaved like savages.  They took possession of the house, became brutally drunk from the liquors they found in the cellar, rioted through its elegantly furnished rooms, burned its fences for bonfires, and for seven days made life a pandemonium of horrors for the helpless woman and frightened children who had been left in their midst.

The experience of those seven days was frightful.  There was no escape.  Mrs. Blennerhasset was compelled to witness the ruthless destruction of all she held most dear, and to listen to the brutal ribaldry and insults of the rioting savages.  Not until the end of the time named did relief come.  Then Mr. Putnam, a friend from the neighboring town of Belpr[’e], ventured on the island.  He provided a boat in which the unhappy lady was enabled to save a few articles of furniture and some choice books.  In this boat, with her two sons, six and eight years old, and with two young men from Belpr[’e], she started down the river to join her husband.  Two or three negro servants accompanied her.

It was a journey of great hardships.  The weather was cold, the river filled with floating ice, the boat devoid of any comforts.  A rude cabin, open in the front, afforded the only shelter from wind and rain.  Half frozen in her flight, the poor woman made her way down the stream, and at length joined her husband at the mouth of the Cumberland River, which he had reached with his companions, having distanced pursuit.  Their flight was continued down the Mississippi as far as Natchez.

No sooner had Mrs. Blennerhasset left the island than the slight restraint which her presence had exercised upon the militia disappeared.  The mansion was ransacked.  Whatever they did not care to carry away was destroyed.  Books, pictures, rich furniture were used to feed bonfires.  Doors were torn from their hinges, windows dashed in, costly mirrors broken with hammers.  Destruction swept the island, all its improvements being ruthlessly destroyed.  For months the mansion stood, an eyesore of desolation, until some hand, moved by the last impulse of savagery, set it on fire, and it was burned to the ground.