Burr rode out from Yeatman’s Tavern at Cincinnati to the Smith farm, about 12 miles away, on horseback, according to a fictional version of the famous Burr conspiracy told by William Henry Venable in “A Dream of Empire.”
As Venable tells the story, Burr found Farmer Smith quite willing to give ear to artful suggestions but whether in the capacity of Senator Smith, the versatile Ohio statesman lent approval, the reader is left to figure out. Besides, Burr discovered another beautiful lady at the Smith home. Not a new lady, to be exact, but an ex-flame with whom this great lover of yesterday had previously played fast and loose according to his carefree habit.
The romance, according to “Dream of Empire” flared anew during the week they spent at Elder-Farmer-Senator Smith’s fine log farmhouse. There they watched the flames in the big stone fireplace or gazed dreamily through the window of a cozy adjoining room. Suddenly—as the story goes— Burr took the lady’s hand and drew from her finger a diamond ring, gage of the love he had allowed to languish, and with it etched the lady’s name “Salome,” with his own beneath it, on the window pane.
Then, true to form, Burr took advantage, according to the “Dream of Empire” author, of the lady’s apparent devotion to urge that she turn over money left her by her dead husband for “investment” in his great scheme.
And right here he made a bad mistake.
The lady thought things over afterward — and so realistically that she decided it was time the president of the United States should know what was going on. Thus Salome, ex lady love, became the nemesis of Aaron Burr.
But her name, with Burr’s intertwined, stayed on the window while the pane of glass remained intact, which was until quite recent years. People came from far and wide to see it.
Among residents of the locality especially interested in the old house, although when they first saw it, about six years ago, the window had been broken, were Judge and Mrs. Simon Boss of Terrace Park.
The place so intrigued them that presently they purchased it and set to work to see how well the century old dwelling of the famous Elder Smith could be restored.
Thus it was that the room in which Aaron Burr had held tryst with the woman whose beauty he had flouted became another lawyer’s library and the one in which the fickle lover and the all too thoughtful lady watched | the burning backlog became a charming post-Colonial period living room.
But of the beautiful home of Margaret Blennerhassett on Blennerhassett Island nothing but a few foundation stones remains. It was burned to the ground. Some choice pieces of the furniture were salvaged and may be seen at the State Memorial Museum at Marietta. When, however, the story is told of their former ownership, most visitors are disinclined to take its romantic details seriously. They cannot accept truth so very much stranger than fiction.
