Before it was a battlefield, the island belonged to a frontier of small mills, cattle drovers, and stories told around fires. A traveler named Fortescue Cuming, passing through in 1807, recorded an encounter with the younger Buffington - 'a very stout young man' carrying a rifle, on his way to a country court day at the falls where he expected to find sixty or seventy men 'some plaintiffs, and some defendants in causes of small debts, actions of defamation, assaults, &c.' along with wrestling, shooting matches for wagers, gambling, and whiskey. The encounter sketches a vanished economy: Buffington traded cattle and hogs to the South Branch of the Potomac for the Baltimore market, and once, when bear skins fetched six to ten dollars apiece, he and a companion killed 135 bears in six weeks. The frontier was already receding by then, but it had not yet disappeared.

By the summer of 1863, the Confederate cause needed something dramatic. Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan proposed a cavalry raid across the Ohio River - deep into the Union states of Indiana and Ohio, far behind any front line - to disrupt Union logistics and force the Federals to chase him. He crossed into Indiana on July 8 with about 2,400 men. For two weeks they rode roughly five hundred miles, sleeping in saddles, eating from saddlebags, leaving a trail of burned bridges and rumors of imminent attack. By July 18, Morgan had reached the Ohio River near Portland, Ohio, hoping to ford back to the southern bank near Buffington Island. He needed the crossing badly. The gunboats arrived first.

At dawn on July 19, Federal cavalry under Brigadier General Edward Hobson and Brigadier General Henry Judah moved against Morgan's tired column. Federal gunboats, including the USS Moose, hammered the Confederates from the river. Morgan's men fought back with cavalry rear-guard actions while the rest tried to swim horses across at the ford. Some made it. Most did not. By the end of the day, about 700 Confederates had surrendered on the riverbank, and roughly 120 were dead or wounded. Morgan himself escaped north with a few hundred men but was captured a week later in Columbiana County. The Battle of Buffington Island marked the effective collapse of the raid, the largest Civil War engagement on Ohio soil, and a small but consequential turning point in the Union's pursuit of irregular Confederate cavalry operations.

The island today is part of the Ohio River Islands National Wildlife Refuge, a string of more than two dozen Ohio River islands managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Most are wooded, undeveloped, and accessible only by boat. Buffington Island has no facilities, no trails, no human presence beyond the occasional birder or fisherman pulling in to the shoreline. On the Ohio side near Portland, the Ohio History Connection maintains a four-acre park with a battle monument and interpretive signs. The combined battlefield-and-island ensemble is a quieter sort of Civil War site, with none of the granite-and-cannon density of Gettysburg or Antietam - just trees, a river, and a small marker explaining that the largest battle in Ohio happened here.

From altitude, Buffington Island appears as a slender wooded sliver in the middle of a long bend in the Ohio River, between Ravenswood, West Virginia, and Racine, Ohio. The river is wide here - more than half a mile - and the island sits closer to the West Virginia bank than the Ohio one. North of the island, the river bends sharply east. The Portland battlefield marker is on the Ohio shore just upstream. From cruising altitude, the scale of the riverbank fight becomes legible: there are only a few flat areas where cavalry could have maneuvered, and they all lie within view of where the gunboats would have anchored.