Theirs was pretty and relatively gentle land, an eight-mile valley running from just north of the Virginia line in current-day Lee County southwestward into what is now Hancock County, Tennessee.
What occurred in 1890 was a visit to the area by an ambitious 29-year-old woman named Will Allen Dromgoole, who had traveled 300 miles from Nashville, and told her hosts she was in the area "for her health."
What she took back from this community of farmers, who in most cases owned the land they worked, was the material for a series of articles that appeared in the Nashville newspaper and in the national magazine Arena. Dromgoole's product was a classic of the eugenics-tinged, white-supremacist writings of the time.
"The Malungeons," Dromgoole wrote, "are filthy, their home is filthy. They are rogues, natural 'born rogues,' close, suspicious, inhospitable, cowardly ... In many cases they resemble the negro. They are exceedingly immoral..."
This of a community of people who, whatever their actual ancestry, considered themselves white with native American heritage. Who, exactly like the their pioneer brethren of ostensibly more certain or "acceptable" ancestry, made their lives from the land, through farming, hunting and gathering; they canned and stored. Many smoked tobacco and many went to church. Among them were moonshiners.
"The area was the frontier at the end of the 18th century," says Wayne Winkler, author of the book "Walking Toward Sunset," "and a place where European immigrants, former indentured servants, the remnants of small, doomed Indian tribes and free African Americans were drawn by cheap land, river transportation, and in Tennessee [until 1834], a constitution permitting any free male to vote."
Life, for all who came to live in this newly settled mountain region, was hardscrabble at best.
Dromgoole's writing, along with the increase in lynchings of blacks, with the Supreme Court's legitimizing of segregation and the ongoing removal of native Americans from their lands, contributed to the period of our history that has been described as "the nadir of race relations in America."
The cause and the confidence of the little community would be set back by Dromgoole's articles for the ensuing hundred or so years, during which time her work was not only seldom challenged, but was taken as definitive, as source material on that southernmountain "boogeyman" - the Melungeon.
As if in response to the young writer's stereotyping and racism, there arrived in the Vardy community in 1892 two Presbyterian missionaries, bringing the leading edges of a body of genuinely humanitarian work that would unfold over the coming decades. In the immediate 15 or so years, the mission worked to establish a church and a school in the Vardy community.
And by 1910, with the coming of Mary Rankin (she would stay and work for three decades) and of Reverend Chester Leonard in 1920 (he too would work tirelessly for more than 30 years), the people of Vardy would be the recipients of care and attention that would help raise their educational achievements, their health and their overall views of life to levels well above other clusters of descendants of migrants who had settled in the Cumberland Gap area. Their school, for instance, would perform better than the white public schools of Hancock County, better than the "Negro" schools of the area.
And when he got there, he was met by Nurse Rankin, who recognized Claude Collins as malnourished, and stood before him until he consumed two glasses of milk before entering the school. And when he got to his classroom, Claude had something else awaiting him: two tablespoons of cod liver oil, to further improve his health.
DruAnna Williams Overbay's book "Windows of the Past: the Cultural Heritage of Vardy," carries a reproduction of the school's "Lunch Report For 1942-43." Included in the glorious detail from the hand of Reverend Leonard is the information that part of the result of serving 16,876 meals for the school year was that Claude Collins gained more weight than all but seven of the school's 125 children. The school average was a gain of 10 pounds; little Claude packed on 13 during that seven-month school year.
Reverend Leonard oversaw a school that had a hot lunch program in the '30s, while Tennessee as a state had no such thing until the '40s. His was a 13-room school full of film strips and careful records of students, and daily tasks for all.
That church, built on land donated by a Melungeon family and completed in 1899, still stands tall and white and proud, but the house of the Lord has been transformed into a house of history, into the repository of the history of a people, many of whom share the most common Melungeon family names: Goins and Johnson, Gibson and Mullins, Moore and Collins. Lots and lots of Collinses.
And here's the amazing thing: All around the church/museum, at just about eye level, are large, framed color photographs. Photos not just of the church, but also of the majestic, three-story Vardy School, its broken-wood ruin visible out the window just up the hill behind the church.
Here too are images of Claude Collins' teachers, of Nurse Rankin, of Reverend Leonard, his wife and parents, of Claude Collins' classmates and friends, all taken seven decades back and within a few hundred feet of where he now stands.
The story behind the photos is nearly as compelling as the subjects of the photos themselves.
According to Overbay, photographs were taken on a regular basis by photographers affiliated with the Presbyterian Board of National Missions in New York, with an especially large number taken soon after the school opened, in the early '30s. The format was glass lantern slides, and many were subsequently hand-tinted.
"The Vardy Presbyterian Church maintained the slides until the '60s," says Overbay. "They were then loaned to a visiting minister, Dr. C.M. Lipsey, to use in a slide carousel. But Lipsey, seeing the decline of the church in those years, put the slides in a safe deposit box."
Overbay says the slides would remain in the box, largely forgotten for three decades.
"When we began the Vardy Community Historical Society in '98," she says, "Dr. Lipsey heard about us on NPR and got in touch to ask if we would like to apply for a grant to transfer the slides to large photographs to hang in the museum."
The result must be witnessed to be fully appreciated: How many communities have, hanging on their community-room wall, a full-color record of their people and institutions of nearly 80 years back?
How many communities have such a strong heritage of overcoming adversity, discrimination and economic disadvantage, and the photos to prove it?
In Hancock County, for instance, the county executive - called the County Mayor - is Greg Marion, who on the day of a drop-in visit to his office, was at work to stretch the annual budget of one of the poorest counties in the nation through the end of the fiscal year.
And not far away in the same courthouse building in Sneedville is the office of Scott Collins, the Clerk and Master of Hancock County, who displays with some pride the four-volume set of the families of the county.
And taking me through the county and these offices is gracious tour guide Winkler, by day the director of WETS Public Radio in Johnson City, and through our day together an easy-going guy whose laconic mien tends to hide a wide body of experience and knowledge ranging from John Updike to Jimi Hendrix, with a broad mix of history and current politics mixed in.
It's a region - these pretty, mountainous, intersecting corners of Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky around Cumberland Gap - that's clearly and pervasively reaching back to its heritage and its past. Consider:
• In Virginia, the nascent Crooked Road Trail (it came into being in 2004) connects the Carter Family Fold, Bristol's Birthplace of Country Music and a half dozen other significant country and bluegrass sites. Wilderness Trail State Park, among the state's newest, celebrates Martin's Station and the Wilderness Road, not far from Cumberland Gap.
• In Kentucky, the history of coal mining and of the region's country music stars merit major attention.
• In Tennessee, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett have long been draws for people with Volunteer roots.
• All three states are a part of Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.
One other thing the three states share is deep roots for those of Melungeon heritage, with enough sites and sights that when you ask Winkler for a driving route through the part of the country that is most strongly associated with the Melungeons, he responds with a deeply detailed itinerary of the region.
Along with a strong and wise perspective on the drive before you begin:
"Anyone taking this trip hoping to see some 'exotic' Melungeons will likely be disappointed. The Melungeons in this region have intermarried with their Scots-Irish and German neighbors for several generations now. One frequently sees the 'Mediterranean' look in individuals if one is looking for it, but that's true just about anywhere. Unless a visitor talks to an acknowledged Melungeon like Claude Collins (who does tours at the Vardy museum), the visitor will come away from the trip knowing that he or she has seen several Melungeon descendents, but will probably not be able to identify most - if any - of them."
No, there is today no such companion to The Crooked Road or the Boone Trail, but when you ask Wayne Winkler, after driving the route described below, if there's been thought given to such a thing, his response is a smiling, "Well, not till just now."
Here's the driving route he provided:
Use of Abingdon, Virginia, not far off 1-81, as a starting point allows for a luxurious nightbefore at The Martha Washington Inn (or at any of a number of fine B&Bs in town), as well as dinner at one of several fine restaurants and the possibility of a play at the Barter Theater.
For the drive, start early in the morning and head northwest out of town on Alt. 58, across the North Fork of the Holston River, through Dickensonville and into the southern edge of Virginia coal country.
A left on Va. 65 at Banners Corner takes you into true Melungeon country, as the small, tidy Scott County towns of Dungannon and Fort Blackmore have strong connections.
"People of mixed European, African, perhaps Mediterranean as well as Indian ancestry stayed in the vicinity," says Winkler. "There were 'Melungins' mentioned in the minutes of the nearby Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church in 1813."
A drive along Va. 619 beside Stony Creek passes many small churches, but none named Stony Creek Primitive Baptist.
Just past Clinchport, 65 tees into U.S. 23; after less than a mile northward on 23, turn left onto Va. 600 to begin into the prettiest and toward the most Melungeon-heritage-intensive portion of the drive. Va. 600 takes you out of Scott County and into Lee County, and then, at the Tennessee border, into Hancock County as the roadway becomes Tenn. 33.
After 33 merges briefly with Tenn. 70 at Kyle's Ford, stay on 70 northward, which takes you back into Virginia (still route 70) through the small town of Blackwater. Just north of the little community, turn left onto Blackwater Road - also known as Vardy Road.
You're now in the valley of the Blackwater River, with the rise of Powell Mountain to your right and of Newman's Ridge to your left. The road is narrow and even gravel in one stretch, but your travel southward will be rewarded.
It is Newman's Ridge that has perhaps the strongest association with Melungeon heritage of any geologic feature in the world. It's a typical Appalachian rise, deeply treed and strongly green against the blue sky on a May day. It is on this hillside that the most famous name in Melungeon history lived. Mahala Mullins' (1825-1902) great weight (legend had it as high as 600 pounds, apparently strongly affected by Elephantiasis), her mothering of 20 children and her reputation as a moonshiner overshadowed her matriarchal and personal strengths to render her a handy stereotyping tool of those who shared her rich skin color and her part of the land.
And a little beyond the midpoint of the drive along Vardy Road, you come to her cabin, disassembled in 2000 from its crumbling state up on Newman's Ridge, brought down to the valley and reassembled just as it stood on the ridge.
Claude Collins is proud of the reconstruction of the cabin, but he's even prouder of what's behind it.
"Look here," he says, putting a key into the new door of a new small structure. He gestures left and then right. "Restrooms!"
The long-term plan is to make the Mahala Mullins cabin a sort of B&B for visitors and researchers, and the restroom is part of the realization.
Even more spectacular in terms of its ties to the heritage and history of a people is the structure directly across the road from the cabin - the Vardy church/museum and behind it on the hill, the ruins of the old Vardy School. The inside of the church has become a museum in the very best sense of the word: The photographs, artifacts and publications all have an immediacy about them. Things are on tables or hung at eye level. The feeling of proud history is palpable with every glance around.
On either side of the church/museum are small houses that once served as homes for teachers and the minister for the church. Among their points of interest is that they are both Sears-Roebuck mail-order houses.
Not far beyond the little cluster of buildings on Vardy Road is the intersection with Tenn. 63. A left turn takes you over the top of Newman's Ridge and offers great views of the pretty Hancock County countryside.
The descent from the ridge line takes you into Sneedville, the county seat and also the seat of more strong Melungeon ties. Here, as you come into town, is the new elementary school, built on the site where the outdoor drama that inspired the title of Wayne Winkler's book -"Walking Toward Sunset" - was performed during the years 1969-'76.
The site and the play are significant for what Winkler and others see as a turning point for those with Melungeon heritage. The sort of "coming out" aspect of the outdoor drama had the effect of changing people's feelings about themselves.
"In an incredibly brief span of time," Winkler writes in the book, "the word 'Melungeon' was transformed from an epithet rarely spoken to a name worn proudly."
Sneedville is home not only to the play site and the county courthouse, but also, for a great downhome lunch, step into Cookie's Drive-In. The popular little restaurant is just down the street from the old jail, which is in the long-term plans for the town for conversion to a museum.
Sneedville is also the birthplace of the recently deceased Jimmy Martin, one of at least several bluegrass music pioneers with Melungeon heritage.
From Sneedville, the drive continues southwest to where Tenn. 33 turns northward as it joins U.S. 25E into Tazewell, a route that takes you by Lincoln Memorial University, formed soon after the Civil War to serve the people of the Cumberland Gap area, who had mostly remained loyal to the Union. The school offers Lincoln memorabilia and has educated the likes of famed Kentucky novelist Jesse Stuart as well as many of Melungeon heritage.
Not far north of LMU, 25E passes through the 10-year-old Cumberland Gap Tunnel, a $280 million project that not only replaced a dangerous 2.3-mile stretch of 25E over the mountain, but also allowed the old roadway to be removed so that the land could be returned as close as possible to its state when the pioneers walked it in the 1700s.
A walk along the Wilderness Road Trail to the saddle of the gap verifies that this step has been successfully taken; I'm alone on the pathway on this day, and as I look westward I'm able to place myself momentarily in another time.
The route back to Abingdon begins as I take U.S. 58 northeast out of the little town of Cumber- land Gap through Rose Hill and Jonesville back to U.S. 23 near Duffield. The drive south takes you to Gate City, where Winkler recommends the Broadwater Drug Store for lunch, at one of the last drugstore lunch counters in the nation.
Beyond Gate City, near Weber City, I take the short sidetrip to the Carter Fold in Hiltons. The music center, established by the late Janette Carter to Honor her parents (A.P. and Sara, who along with A.P.'s sister-in-law Maybelle made up the Carter Family), features live country music on Saturday nights.
What remains shrouded in the mists of ancient history is where the people who migrated to that area came from in the first place.
What is generally agreed upon is the mixed-race make-up of the gene pool, and that part of that blend rendered the Melungeons "tri-racial isolates," resulting in legal and social discrimination for centuries.
The trend in recent years - given new genetic studies and perhaps less of a will to find the answer - has been to say that Melungeons share traits with populations in the Mediterrean and Middle East, as well as with northern Europeans, Native Americans and African Americans. And to note further that not all Melungeons share all of those traits; that it is impossible to learn where the various ethnic components entered a given family line and that the origins are almost certainly far more complex than the earlier attempts to tie the Melungeons directly to the Lost Colony of Roanoke, for instance, or to a Portuguese shipwreck.
In this context, Winkler asserts strongly that the name Melungeon was imposed on, rather than adopted by, the people who now carry the name with pride. (It should be noted that noted Melungeon scholar N. Brent Kennedy disagrees, feeling that the possible Turkish genetic and linguistic connection suggest that the name was taken on rather than assigned.)
A few dates in the evolution of the movement from the era of Melungeon families telling children never to use “that word” to an era of a group of people that meets once a year to celebrate heritage and to explore further the ancient reaches of their history:
Late 1700s: Melungeon families migrate to the Hancock County, Tenn./Lee and Scott counties, Va. area, about the same time as white settlers arrive.
1813: Stony Creek Baptist Church (Scott County, Virginia) records include the first written record of the word “Melungeon.”
1834: The Tennessee Constitutional Convention classifies Melungeons as “free persons of color,” which has the effects of removing land rights and assigning Melungeons to “Negro” schools, which they decline to attend.
Civil War era: Melungeon families, like their white neighbors of the region, side primarily with the Union, with a significant minority siding with the Confederacy.
1890: A series of newspaper and national magazine articles by a 29-year-old woman named Will Allen Dromgoole carry a racist, stereotyping caste; the articles will form the foundation of much of what is written about the Melungeons for the ensuing century.
1899: The Northern Presbyterian Mission Church establishes a mission in the Vardy Valley in present-day Hancock County, Tennessee.
1924: Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act stipulates in part that “the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” Of course no anthropologist has been able to establish the existence of a “pure” Caucasian, the act in effect decreed Melungeons “colored” and thereby forbidden by law to marry “white” people.
1930s-’40s: The Melungeons are again the subject of magazine pieces, including one in the Saturday Evening Post, which, while carrying some of the stereotyping of the Dromgoole pieces, are enlightened at least to the point of recognizing the Melungeons’ wariness in both talking to reporters and in uttering the name apparently assigned to them by history.
These years are also perhaps the high point of the Vardy School, as run by Reverend Chester Leonard and nurse Mary Rankin. The imposing wooden school (built in ‘29) and neighboring church are the focal point of life for the eight-mile Vardy Valley of Tennessee and Virginia.
1960s: As Wayne Winkler writes, “the stigma of being a Melungeon was disappearing, but so were the Melungeons themselves,” as dispersal and intermarriage continued.
1969: As if in final proof of the “coming out” of those of Melungeon heritage, the Hancock County Drama Association produces the outdoor drama “Walking Toward The Sunset,” a celebration of heritage. The drama is produced annually until 1976, long enough, according to Winkler, “to bring a sense of pride to the Melungeons.”
Late 1980s-early ’90s: N. Brent Kennedy discovers, in part through an article in the July/August 1991 edition of this magazine, his family’s heritage, and dedicates much of his life to work on that heritage, in the process founding the Melungeon Research Committee. Kennedy’s subsequent book “The Melungeons: the Resurrection of a Proud People; An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America” (1994), along with his leadership and personal magnetism, serve to throw open the doors of Melungeon scholarship and celebration of heritage.
July 1997: Some 600 people arrive in tiny Wise, Virgina for a gathering called First Union, with the name (as opposed to Reunion) emphasizing the first-time-ever coming together of a people who, until just a few decades earlier “could not have been here… wouldn’t have been allowed to be here,” as Connie Clark, a high school teacher from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, said of the gathering that was expected to draw no more than 50 people.
2000s: The flow of research and publication (especially through Mercer University Press’s Melugeon Series, with Brent Kennedy serving as editor) continues in something approaching a celebratory gush.
And the little cluster of buildings along Vardy Road – the church/museum, the Mullins cabin and the ghost of the school – are in full flower as the repository of the history of a proud people.
Wayne Winkler, author of "Walking Toward Sunset" and director of WETS public radio in Johnson City, Tenn., had those very experiences with some older members of his family, and also somewhat of a variation on the theme.
"I talked to my father about our Indian and Melungeon heritage more in his later years," Winkler says. "And one day I got up the nerve to ask him: Dad, how come, over the years, when people asked you about our heritage, you always said 'Indian' and never said 'Melungeon'?"
"Well," the old man said with a sigh, "you can just say 'Indian' and go on with your day. You say 'Melungeon' and you're going to be doing a whole lot of explaining. "