One and one-half miles below the confluence of the Ohio and Little Kanawha rivers, Blennerhassett Island was the home of Irish aristocrat Harnman Blennerhassett and his wife Margaret from 1798 to 1806. It became known for Blennerhassett's participation in Aaron Burr's mysterious military enterprise of 1806-07, when the island served as a staging ground for boats, supplies, and volunteers who departed in December 1806 for the wilderness of the lower Mississippi River. The Blennerhassetts occupied an elegant Palladian-style mansion, rebuilt on its original site from 1984 to 1991. The island has been almost continuously inhabited for 13,000 years, most of that time by prehistoric Indians. Nemacolin, the noted Indian guide and trailblazer, lived there in the 1760s, and later visitors included George Rogers Clark, Johnny Appleseed, Henry Clay, Walt Whitman, and "Gentleman Jim” Corbett. During the Civil War, in July 1863, members of the 15th Ohio Volunteer Infantry under Col. William Wallace guarded the island ford at its lower end during John Hunt Morgan's famous raid into Ohio, but an anticipated Ohio River crossing there did not occur.