We’re pleased to present the 10th edition of THE HEART OF THE MOUNTAINS, Blue Ridge Country’s ongoing bimonthly digital issue. This edition features Heroic Peoples of the Mountains. These stories, chosen from the BRC archive that now goes back 33 years, recall some of the most memorable and most-sought-out pieces in the magazine’s history:
• The Melungeons: Finding an Identity (Parts I-IV: In Search of; Identity Found; Reunion; View Forward.) For many decades, a set of people who lived primarily in northeastern Tennessee and far southwest Virginia were marked by a tendency to deny their darker-skinned identity and instead call themselves Irish. When one man read our first story, it changed his life and set him on a path to learn his family’s actual heritage. From there, consciousness about the Melungeons grew exponentially, to the point of gatherings, books and family realizations. Our last piece takes a years-later look at these changes and learnings.
• The Cherokee Trail of Tears. The years 1838-39 marked the forced removal of some 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation in North Carolina. As they were put in wagons and taken to Oklahoma, about 4,000 died. The “American Holocost,” as the Removal has been called, was opposed by some whites of the day, including Davy Crockett, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, but was championed by President Andrew Jackson.
• Kentucky Blue People: The Fugates of Troublesome Creek. Even the placenames spell the trouble one extended family faced, beginning in the early 1800s. Along Troublesome Creek near Hazard, Kentucky, the Fugates and their kin tended to hide away, lest people see and judge their indigo blue skin. The fact that the cause turned out to be relatively simple—abnormally high blood levels of methomoglobin—did not slow the prejudice they faced.
• The Mennonites of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Beyond the bonnets and buggies that define a people to outsiders, the Mennonites of the Shenandoah Valley are both a varied group, and one that adheres to the principles of simplicity, frugality and common sense, none of which has prevented them from being part of modern times in many contexts.
This is the 10th in our ongoing HEART OF THE MOUNTAINS series. If you have not already, we invite you to enjoy the rest of the series and more in our digital archives found here.
Please note, we’ve digitized these pieces just as they appeared in their original print form. Please remember that as a result, all quotes and references to “present day” things such as artifacts and other items are contemporaneous to the time of publication rather than the current time.