Eyewitness in the Ozarks

 Continuing with Eyewitnesses to History

The use of the word Melungeon was first published in Parson Brownlow's WHIG in 1840 in a political article calling a man from 'Washington City' [as in District of Columbia] a Melungeon, not in the Stony Creek Church record 'fairy tales' that has been published so many times it has become fact, but that is for another time.  Parson Brownlow's son John Bell Brownlow will appear as an Eyewitness in a later blog. 

There were pockets of these families spread out from coast to coast.  The Crow Creek Chavis families known as Portuguese, the Collins-Reeds in Morgan Co., Indiana, Ashworths in Texas, Ivey in South Carolina, Perkins, Shoemake, Goins, Bolton etc., in Hamilton County, the Nickens, Collins, etc., in Wilson County [Malungeon Town] the Goins from the previous blog in Illinois, the Magoffin County Indians, Carmel Indians, the Malunjins of Henry Co., Ala., of course the Croatans, the Redbones, the Smiling Indians, the Brass Ankles of South Carolina, and the Oxendine, Shoemakes etc., in Vineyard, Washington Co., Arkansas, later in California,  from the Pee Dee who filed Cherokee Applications.  Testimony said they weren't Cherokee they had been known as Portuguese.  In the 1850s there was a 'Mysterious Molungen' group in Virginia, written in numerous newspapers yet the Library of Virginia has no record of them. In 1856 Parson Brownlow called Frederick Ross a 'Malungeon' in his book THE GREAT IRON WHEEL.  Also of course the Melungeons of East Tenn., SW Va., and SE Kentucky and the 'Lungins' of Baxter Co., Arkansas on the White River.  Most of these families, if not all, were connected in one way or another. 

The author of this article on the people of the Ozarks, R.O. Amer writes; 

"Now, the writer makes no pretense of any scientific investigation in relation to either of these people."

Most of his information ''comes from hearsay and from reading." While he did not live among them or apparently visit them, his information is from hearsay and reading about what others said at the turn of the century. 

STRANGE FOLKS OF THE OZARKS

Are They Also Part of the Mysterious Early 

Immigrant Race.

By R. O. Amer

"It would appear that the Melungeons really arouse more attention among students of ethnology in other parts of the country than among the people immediately surrounding them. 

It is no unusual experience for a visitor from Tennessee in Boston to have many questions asked concerning this strange, mysterious people. And as a rule, the visitor from Tennessee is force to express a large degree of ignorance. This writing is not the result of personal investigation among the Melungeons themselves -- merely the outcome of reading practically everything obtainable on the subject and many interviews with persons living in the sections of mountain country more or less inhabited by these people. 

Among the comparatively few instructive articles on the subject, the writings of Miss Will Allen Dromgoole of Nashville, have been given careful study.  That well known writer presents a very different picture of the characteristics of the Melungeons from that given by most persons who have come in contact with them and by other writers.  She makes them appear, practically, a set of brigands, too cowardly to engage in brigandage.  Other investigators represent them as a peaceful, long-suffering, patient people - not disposed in any greater degree than the whites by whom they are surrounded to be lawbreakers.

Possibly an explanation of these differences in description may be found in the supposition  that the Melungeons may differ widely in different localities.  The section of country visited by Miss Dromgoole does not contain, by any means, all the Melungeons.  And, while she may have found them the lawless set of rascals she describes, it is a fact that in other places they are represented to be exactly the reverse.

A considerable colony of these Melungeons exists in the neighborhood of Graysville.  There, as elsewhere, they are more frequently known by some family name than by that given to them as a people.  Around Graysville most of them are known as "Noels." there the members of the "Noel" family predominate.  For untold years they have married and intermarried, replenishing the earth with new Noels - until, as stated, they have come to be known by their family name better than by that given to their race.

In and around Graysville these "Noels" have the reputation of being very peaceable, very ignorant, and very little concerned with the affairs of the outside world. In no case does there appear to be any romance about these people.  The most careful and even most imaginative investigators and writers have found themselves unable to associate anything of the hero type with the Melungeon character. 

Some of the young girls are described as beautiful specimens of physical womanhood.  But the men are, are anything but beautiful. And the girls, when older grown, develop late features who would not be prize-winners in beauty contests.

It is interesting in this connection, to note that occasional travelers in some sections of the Ozark Mountains have given descriptions of a mysterious people there.  These descriptions are by no means specific in detail. The "strange people of the Ozarks" are mentioned merely as a sort of curiosity in the human race.  So far as is known they never venture far from their mountain fastness; seldom, if ever, go down among the abiding places of the white man.  They are represented as having a sort of language of their own which some have imagined might be a conglomeration of Portuguese or Spanish with some Indian dialect and suggestions of origin in the English language.

These Ozark habitues, like the Melungeons, are represented as being uneducated, and having no special  manifested fondness for or devotion to any form of religion. They live, or exist, on the fruits of the soil, contented, seemingly, with the bare necessities of life.  So far as any information on the subject has been given, they do not call upon physicians from the outside world, are described as seldom ill, and living to an old age.

Now, the writer makes no pretense of any scientific investigation in relation to either of these people.  Most of his information comes from hearsay and from reading.  At the same time, the thought has suggested itself that there may be some relationship, dating from a remote past between these respective tribes of mountain dwellers.

One of the most able and interesting contributions to the speculations concerning the Melungeons is a ___ ___ article from the pen of Judge Lewis Shepherd, of Chattanooga, published in the Times of that city several years ago. Judge Shepherd sets up the theory, and to his own satisfaction substantiates it, that the Melungeons are descendants of the Phoenicians. He may be right.  It is not the province of the mere observing and speculating mind to take issue with this learned Judge.

At the same time, it may be that the Chattanooga writer, or some other equally earnest and learned investigator some time may trace the Ozark Mountain refugees to a similar origin.  It does not appear that any origin of the Melungeons or of the Ozark queer folks will be of any special value in calculating the result of earliest immigration upon the  present development of the people and institutions of the country.  

The Melungeons, from all accounts, appear to hold their own in point of numbers.  Probably the same is true concerning the Ozark tribe.  But nothing of what is seen of their present can have any special influence or bearing on the destiny of the nation or the fortunes of those directly surrounding them.  

End of Article

***********

Note in this map below of the sub regions of the Ozarks is the town of West Plains in Howell County, Missouri. There are a number of families living here that while not 'called Melungeons' are related to, or at least from the same geographical area, as the Melungeons in Tennessee.  

David Collins whose DNA matches that of the 'Head and Source" of the Melungeons, Vardy Collins, and probably his first cousin, 

had descendants who settled in West Plains.

The Caulders who name appears on this  1794 South Carolina petition with the Melungeon families of Shoemake, Perkins, and Boltons,  also settled in West Plains. The Caulders first settled in Arkansas in the Ozark Mountain county, called "Izard" 

at the time, with the Turner families after leaving South Carolina. 

Thomas Hall, whose ancestors were Portuguese,  obtained from the Maury County court a "Proof of Race" affidavit which was filed in Arkansas as well as Missouri. His descendants also settled in West Plains and used this "Proof of Race" to win their case in several courts. Peter Caulder married into this Hall family in Arkansas and the families then settled in West Plains.

 

Questions?  Email Me - JoannePezzullo@aol.com

 

    

 

Eyewitness Laurance Johnson

EYEWITNESS  LAURENCE C. JOHNSON

February 5th of 1889 Swan Burnett read his piece “A Note on the Melungeons” before the Society of American Anthropologists. It was published in newspapers across the country and beyond.  Burnett’s article was published in October of 1889, Vol. 11, pp 347-349, "American Anthropologist Magazine."

After appearing in the Atlanta Constitution later that week Mr. Laurence C. Johnson wrote to the editor on March 11, 1889 with the history of the ‘Melungeons’ as he knew it. This appeared prior to Dromgoole. Mr. Johnson was not selling newspapers, writing an article or selling a book. It appears he was simply responding to the article by Swan Burnett, he recognized these people Burnett wrote about, he says their name is a local designation  - the Pee Dee?  Or Newmans Ridge? Or both?   Later documents show the families on the Pee Dee, the Lumbee, were known as Melungeons.  Also in Hamilton Co., Tennessee, Dothan, Henry Co., Alabama, Baxter Springs, Arkansas maybe?  

 I believe this story is an important one in the way that it is told.  More proof of the connection between the families on the Pee Dee and Newmans Ridge will be in later posts. 

Atlanta Constitution
March 11, 1889
The Melungeons

Meridian, Miss.,
March 11– Editors Constitution

Near a month ago an article appeared in The CONSTITUTION named Melungeons. I laid it aside in order to correspond with the writer, but the paper got destroyed and the name and address had not been noticed with care, and are forgotten. Excuse me then for addressing him through the same medium.

His name Melungeons is a local designation for this small peculiar race. Their own claim to be Portuguese is more generally known. Their original site is on the Pedee river in South and North Carolina . They were once especially strong in Georgetown and Darlington districts of the latter. Though called Portuguese – this does not indicate their true origin. I have no doubt local traditions, and the records still to be found in the Charleston library will give the true account. As dimly recollected, for I never made search with a purpose in view, it was thus in the primary colonial times of the Carolinas, Winyaw Bay was the best and most frequented harbor on the coast, and Georgetown more accessible, was more of a commercial town than old Charlestown., to that port British cruisers sometimes brought prizes.

Among these once was a Salee Rover, (*See Below) which was sold for the distribution of the proceeds as prize money. The crew consisting mostly of Moors, with a sprinkling of Arabs and negroes, were turned ashore free. Their complexion and religion prevented immediate absorption by the white race, and they found wives among Indians, negroes and cast off white women at a time when many of these last were sold by immigrant ships for their passage money. They became a peculiar people. They were the free people of color of the Pedee region so true to Marion during our revolutionary struggle and no other race in America retained such traditionary hatred of the British.

Your correspondent [whose name I am sorry to have forgotten] having a taste for ethnological studies will confer a favor upon that branch of early post-colonial record and legislative proceedings of South Carolina. He will find it sustained by the appearance of these people if he can find a few pure specimens–their physical structure, their hair, their teeth, and general features, though every trace of their Moslem religion and north African dialect may have long been lost.

Very respectfully,

Laurence C. Johnson

---

About the Author

Lawrence Clement Johnson was born August 21, 1821 in Chester County, South Carolina.   He died August 14, 1909 at the Confederate home  (Beauvoir) in Gulfport, Mississippi.  He was the son of Dr. Benjamin Brown Johnson and Jane Milling Young Johnson.  He was the grandson of William Johnson, Revolutionary War soldier of Charleston, South Carolina and  was a Lieutenant in Company F. 9th Mississippi Infantry CSA.

Johnson was a pioneer in the discovery and description of the phosphate fields of Florida and in 1886, he wrote a paper entitled "The Structure of Florida" and presented it at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York.

He lived in Holly Springs, Mississippi (Marshall County) and by 1860 held the position of Clerk of the Circuit Court in Marshall County.  In 1882, he was hired as an Assistant Geologist.

Johnson married Mattie McLain, daughter of Rev. Robert McLain and Laura Brown McLain in Clarke County, Mississippi.  The following year, Johnson's young wife died within a month of giving birth to their daughter, also named Mattie.  Their little girl only lived three years.  Johnson never remarried. He is buried in Enterprise Cemetery, Clark County, Mississippi beside his late wife and daugher.

NATIONAL SURVEYS ARTICLE - NEW YORK TIMES   June 29, 1885

Information provided by- Peggy Johnson Carey

carey@seark.net

---

THE NEWS AND OBSERVER

Raleigh, NC 

Wednesday - March 20, 1889

 

A writer in the Atlanta Constitution looks for further information with respect to the "Melungeons,"  the supposed Portuguese colony and its descendants who dwelt chiefly on the Pee Dee river in North and South Carolina.  He ways that though called Portuguese, this designation does not correctly indicate their true origin.  He maintains, while not pretending to be strictly accurate, that "in the primary colonial times of the Carolinas, Winyaw Bay was the best and most frequented harbor on the coast, and Gerogetown, more accessible, was more of a commercial town than old Charlestown.  To that port British cruisers sometimes brought prizes.  Among these once was a Salee Rover, which was sold for the distribution of the proceeds as prize money.  The crew, consisting mostly of Moors, with a sprinkling of Arabs and negroes, were turned ashore free.  Their complexion and religion prevented immediate absorption by the white race, and they found wives among Indians, negroes and cast-off white women sold by immigrant ships for their passage money.  They became a peculiar people.  These were the free people of color of the Pee Dee region so true to Marion during our revolutionary struggle, and no other race in America retained such traditionary hatred of the British.  'Hamilton McMillan, Esq', in his little work on the identity of the Henry Berry Lowery people of the Pee Dee region with the lost tribe of Croatan Indians, makes the supposed Portuguese, the Lowery tribe and the Croatans one and the same mixed race of people, if we remember rightly.  Now here we have them "Moors, with a sprinkling of Arabs and negroes."  Who can throw further light on the 'Melungeons?"

---

Eyewitness Swan Burnett

........

These next posts will be told by the Eyewitnesses of History. Those who lived with, interviewed, and researched the Melungeon families in late 1800 and early 1900s.

This first article was from February of 1889 and likely what prompted Will Allen Dromgoole to visit Newmans Ridge in the midst of the Greene-Jones War. This pre-dates the articles by Will Allen Dromgoole. 

EYEWITNESS - SWAN BURNETT 

A NOTE ON THE MELUNGEONS

Read before the Society at its regular meeting, February 5, 1889.

By Swan M. Burnett, M. D., Washington

October 1889

This article was read before the Anthropological Society of Washington D. C on February 5, 1889. 

Published in the American Anthropologist in October of that year.  It appeared February 10, 1889 in the Atlanta Constitution, and the  Hartford Courant  March 8, 1889.   It was mentioned also in Boston Traveler  June 13 1889.   It was also mentioned in the July 1889 publication of The Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Progress of Anthropology in 1889)  and numerous publications across the country. 

In 1890 it appeared in the German publication 

Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie.  

Legends of the Melungeons I first heard at my father’s knee as a child in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee, and the name had such a ponderous and inhuman sound as to associate them in my mind with the giants and ogres of the wonder tales I listened to in the winter evenings before the crackling logs in the wide-mouth fireplace. And when I chanced to waken in the night and the fire had died down on the hearth, and the wind swept with a demoniac shriek and terrifying roar around and through the house, rattling the windows and the loose clapboards on the roof, I shrank under the bedclothes trembling with a fear that was almost an expectation that one of these huge creatures would come down the chimney with a rush, seize me with his dragon-like arms, and carry me off to his cave in the mountains, there to devour me piecemeal.

In the course of time, however, I came to learn that these creatures with the awe-inspiring name were people somewhat like ourselves, but with a difference. I learned, too, that they were not only different from us, the white, but also from the Negroes–slave or free–and from the Indian. They were something set apart from anything I had seen or heard of. Neither was the exact nature of this difference manifest even in more mature years, when a childish curiosity had given way to an interest more scientific in its character. There was evidently a caste distinction as there was between the white and Negro, and there was also a difference between them and the free Negroes. No one seemed to know positively that they or their ancestors had ever been in slavery, and they did not themselves claim to belong to any tribe of Indians in that part of the country. They resented the appellation Melungeon, given to them by common consent by the whites, and proudly called themselves Portuguese.

The current belief was that they were a mixture of white, Indian, and Negro. On what data that opinion was based I have never been able to determine, but the very word Melungeon would seem to indicate the idea of a mixed people in the minds of those who first gave them the name. I have never seen the word written, nor do I know the precise way of spelling it, but the first thought that would come to one on hearing it would be that it was a corruption of the French word melangee—mixed.

It was not, however, until I had left East Tennessee and become interested in anthropology–chiefly through my membership in this Society—that the peculiarities of this people came to have any real significance for me, and I was then too far away to investigate the matter personally to the extent I desire. I have, however, for several years past pursued my inquiries as best I could through various parties living in the country and visiting it, but with no very pronounced success. I have thought it well, however, to put on record in the archives of the Society the few notes I have been able to obtain, trusting that some one with better opportunity may be induced to pursue the matter further.

It appears that the Melungeons originally came into east Tennessee from North Carolina, and the larger number settled in what was at that time Hawkins County, but which is now Hancock. I have not been able to hear of them in any of the lower counties of east Tennessee, and those I have seen myself were in Cocke county, bordering on North Carolina. At what time this emigration took place in not known, but it was certainly as long ago as seventy-five or eighty years. One man, “Old Sol. Collins,” in Hancock County, claims that his father fought in the revolution.

They are known generally by their family names, as the “Collinses,” &c., and on account of the caste restriction, which has always been rigorously maintained, they do not intermarry with the Negroes or Indians. As stated before, they are held by the whites to be a mixed race with at least a modicum of Negroes blood, and there is at least one instance on record in which the matter was brought before the courts. It was before the war–during the time of slavery–that the right of a number of these people to vote was called in question. The matter was finally carried before a jury and the question decided by an examination of the feet. One, I believe, was found to be sufficiently flat-footed to deprive him of a right of suffrage. The others, four or five in number, were considered as having sufficient white blood to allow them a vote. Col. John Netherland, a lawyer of considerable local prominence defended them.

It should be stated, however, that there is a disposition on the part of the more thoughtful of those among whom these people live to give some credence to their claim of being a distinct race, a few inclining to the Portuguese theory, some thinking that they may possibly be gypsies, while yet others think that they may have entered the country as Portuguese or gypsies and afterward some families may have intermingled with negroes or Indians or with both. So far as I have been able to learn, however, there was not at any time a settlement of Portuguese in or near North Carolina of which these people could have been an offshoot. Those that I have seen had physical peculiarities which would lend plausibility to any one of the foregoing theories.

They are dark, but of a different hue to the ordinary mulatto, with either straight or wavy hair, and some have cheek bones almost as high as the Indians. The men are usually straight, large, and find looking, while one old woman I saw was sufficiently hag-like to have sat for the original Meg Merriles. As a rule, they do not stand very high in the community, and their reputation for honesty and truthfulness is not to be envied. In this, however, there are said to be individual exceptions.

It is perhaps characteristic of them that, since a revenue tax has been placed by the Government on the manufacture of spirituous liquors, these people have been engaged largely in illicit distilling; but, whatever may have been their origin, it is still a fact of interest that there has existed in East Tennessee for nearly a hundred years a class of people held both by them selves and by the people among whom they live as distinct from the three other races by whom they are surrounded, and I trust that these few imperfect notes may cause a study of them to be made by some one more competent than myself. For assistance in getting information I am particularly indebted to Dr. J. M. Pierce, of Hawkins county, Tennessee, and to Dr. Gurley, of the Smithsonian Institution.

Since the above communications was read before the Society I have received from several sources valuable information in regard to the Melungeons; but the most important contribution bearing on the subject, as I believe, is the little pamphlet published by Hamilton Mc Millan, A. M., on “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony” (Wilson, N.C., 1888). Mc Millan claims that the Croatan Indians are the direct descendant of this colony. What connection I consider to exist between the Melungeons and the Croatan Indians, as well as other material I have accumulated in regard to the Melungeons, will be made the subject of **another communication which is now in preparation.

** This Communication has not been located but it is mentioned by Dr. C.A. Petersen;   "Dr. Swan M. Burnett, a distinguished scholar and scientist- the husband, by the way, of Mrs. Francis Hodgson Burnett, the novelist has traced by family names  the connection between the Melungeons and the Croatans."

Annual Report By Smithsonian Institution - 1890

A paper read by Dr. Burnett before the Washington Anthropological Society on the Melungeons in the southern Alleghanies is a case in point. Neither white nor black nor Indians, these people live encysted, like the Basques of the Pyrenees and little contaminated by mixture. Neither white nor black nor Indians, these people live encysted, like the Basques of the Pyrenees and little contaminated by mixture.

ABOUT DOCTOR SWAN M. BURNETT

Born 16 MAR 1847 in New Market, Jefferson County, Tennessee. "In 1870 he received his M.D. degree from Bellevue Hospital Medical School, NYC. From 1870-75 he practiced medicine in Knoxville, TN.

Dr. Burnett took his wife abroad in 1875, where for two years he studied ontology and ophthalmology in London and Paris. Returning to the U.S., he settled in Washington, D.C., where he became a distinguished specialist.

He earned a PHD. degree at Georgetown University in 1890. Earlier, in 1878, he had been appointed lecturer in ophthalmology and ontology at Georgetown Medical College, attaining the rank of full professor in 1889. He was a co-founder of the Emergency Hospital in Washington, and established the Lionel Laboratory as a memorial to a son who died in childhood.

At the time of his death he possessed the largest privately owned medical library in Washington. Also, he devised the first ophthalmoscope with a rack for holding the correcting lenses of the observer while making an eye examination. The author of several books in his field of specialization, he helped compile the National Medical Dictionary (1889), and also wrote extensively on his hobby, Japanese art, for the International Studio, Connoisseur, and the Craftsman.

Melungeons - Pope County Illinois

 

These families, Goins, Bolin, Helton, Fields are from the Melungeon families of East Tennessee

THE TENNESSEEAN

24 May 1891

ABORIGINAL RELICS

A Melungeon Tribe on the Ohio River 

In Illinois

The interest aroused by Miss Will Allen Dromgoole's sketches of the Melungeons of East Tennessee, has been widespread.  It has inspired study of local peculiarities in many Southern districts, and the following letter, from Illinois, is of interest, especially to show how common these wandering relics of the savage tribes are.  

The name given to these people by Miss Bondeau recalls the Gan tribe of Southern and Middle Tennessee, which has many of the Melungeon attributes.  The religious tendencies of the Illinois people are distinctive.

Dear Miss Dromgoole:

I fear you will think I-a stranger-am taking a great liberty in writing to you, but I have read with much interest your articles on the "Melungeons" in the March and May numbers of the Arena, and I want to tell you about a people here who, I think, must belong to that race.

For many years, just how many I cannot tell, but certainly since the early sixties, a set of people known as the Goinses, or Goins tribe, have lived her in Pope County, Ill., and just across the Ohio River in Livingston County, Ky.

The came, they say, from Tennessee. They claim to be of Cherokee descent, and many of them show traces of this in their tal, spare frames, high cheek bones, straight black hair and keen eyes, while others have the kinky hair, flat noses and thick lips of the negro.  All have reddish brown skins.  Some are darker than others, but it is the same color and differs from any shade of the negro.

They hold themselves utterly distinct and apart from their white and black neighbors, marrying each other.

There are exceptions, but this is the rule, and one girl, now living with the negroes in this town was cut off by her family on this account.

The greater number of these people are named Goins, and they are always spoken of collectively as the Goinses or the Goins tribe but there are other family names among them.  Of these the principal on is Helton. Then there is Boulden or Bolden, a Still and a Fields.

Some years ago there was a Goins settlement in Pope County and one in Livingston County, besides families living on the farms lying along the river.  Here they rented from the owners or worked, the men as farm hands, the women about the house.

I passed through Kentucky settlement about eighteen years ago. It was a row of dilapidated log cabins set down any way on either side of the road which lay along the top of a ridge about a mile from the river.  Some of the homes had little vegetable gardens [truck patches, they were called] around them, but it looked a poverty stricken place and people. There was also a log cabin church, for they are for the most part quiet, peaceable and deeply religious.  My home, until three years ago, was on an island in the Ohio River, between these two counties, and often on summer nights we listened to their singing at their church in Illinois. Very sweet and mournful, too, it sounded across the water. 

On Sundays they came in crowds to the river bank to baptize the converts, or when their were none of these, to visit back and forth across the river.  They delighted in visiting.

One girlcoming fresh from Tennessee where she had been left when her people came, lived for a whiel with us.  She told my mother she never heard of the "Good Man" til she came here and knew no difference between Sunday and other days.  She said one day when told to close the shutters, "I done shot the blinders."  The we children thought was very funny, as many of her expressions were.

One Jim Goins with his family lived some months on our island. The wife went barefooted and clad in the thinnest of cotton dresses until they left near Christmas.  My mother ordered her clothes which she declined, declaring she was not cold.

George Hilton, the head of the Hilton family was considered by the white people the most intelligent of the lot.  He worked for us more than a year and my father taught him to read and write a little.  He looked like an Indian, tall, with straight black hair and black eyes.  He was very superstitious, a strong believer in signs and omens, and a great weather prophet.  He was afraid of the dark.  I never heard that he feared anything else but go outside the house after dark without a light he would not.  When twitted with cowardice, he would say; 

"You kid call it what you please.  I jus' aint a-gwine."

From the first their sole aim and desire seemed to be to "get out to the Nation" as they expressed it. 

A few years ago the greater part of them went - and the Nation refused to receive them. After this they scattered. Only a few of them drifted back here where still a few were left. 

It was at this place, Golconda, Ill., that [in 1839 I think] the Southern Indian tribes crossed the Ohio River when they were taken out to the reservations, and I have thought this perhaps why the Goinses came here.  At least, no one seems to know anything about it, and I can think of no other reason for it.

They claim relationship with the Cherokees.  They came here not many years after the crossing of the tribes. They settled on either side of the river not farther away than six or eight miles from the Indian crossing place, and afterwards went in to join them. 

I have always been interested in this strange people, but never could learn anything more about them than what I have told you. Since your article appeared I truly think my Goinses must have come from your Melungeons, and this is why I have written all this to you.

Isabell J. Bordeau

Golconda, Polk County, Ill.

Melungeon History Part II

KNOXVILLE SENTINEL (Knoxville, Tennessee

07 Oct 1911

Advent of "Melongeons" 

    to Eastern Tennessee

(By L.M. Jarvis.)

Sneedville, Oct. 7. -The Melongeons of Newman's Ridge and Blackwater in Hancock county I have known all my life.  I will be 82 years old on October 26, and I have lived here at the base of Newman's Ridge, Blackwater, being on the opposite side for the last seventy-one years and well known the history of the these people on Newman's ridge and Blackwater enquired about as Melongeons. These people were friendly to Cherokee Indians who came west with the white imigration from New river and Cumberland, Va., about the year 1790.  Before that date these Indians were com-_? because of their desertion of their tribe, their loyalty to the white people and their many betrayals of Indians plans and plots to kill the white people. 

They came here with the white people and simultaneously settle on Newman's ridge and Blackwater in what is now Hancock county.  White people settled in more desirable places. The name "Melongeon" was coined in derision, and was given them on account of their color.

I have seen the oldest and first settlers of this tribe who first occupied Newman's ridge and Blackwater and I have owned much of the lands on which they first settled.  They obtained their land grants from North Carolina.  I personally knew Vardy Collins, Solomon D. Collins, Shephard Gibson, Paul Bunch and Benjamin Bunch and many of the Goodmans, Moores, Williams, and Sullivans, all of the very first settlers and noted men of these friendly Indians.  They took their sir names from white people of that name with who they came here.  As a general thing they were reliable and truthful and faithful to any ting they promised, and with few exceptions, could be relied upon. 

In the civil war most of the Melongeons went into the Union army and made good soldiers.  Their Indian blood has about run out.  They are growing white. The whites seem to keep on top.

I have written much of the history of these people heretofore.  They have been misrepresented by many writers, as an original tribe of Indians found here by the first settlers and whose origin could not be traced to Indians. 

In my former writings I have given their statons and stops on their way as they eimgrated to this country with white people, one of which places was at the mouth of Stony Creek on Clinch River in Scott county, Virginia where they built a fort and called it Fort Blakamore after Col. Blackamore who was with them.

When they left there they came to Newman" ridge and Blackwater, but a great many of these Indians, posterity whose ancestry -- in the neighborhood of Fort Blackamore to this good day. 

When Daniel Boone was here hunting for three years probably from 1763 to 1767, there Melongeons were not here. 

Melungeon History Part I

MORRISTOWN REPUBLICAN (Morristown, Tennessee

21 August 1897

MELUNGEON THEORY KNOCKED OUT

NO PORTUGUES BLOOD IN THESE PEOPLE

They Are a Mixture of Indian, Negroe and White Races

Sneedville, Tenn., Aug. 13

-Much has been written by strangers and outsiders about the Melungeons of Hancock County and their origin, These writers have not yet learned, else they have failed to write it, and therefore the truth for them has not been told, and their origin is still a mystery to the outside world.  People have come here to write them up and they represent them as a separate and distinct class of people.  If they are from whence did they come?  

Melungeon is a home-spun word in the mountains of east Tennessee and Southwest Virginia, and originated here from a cross of races of this section of country. When the Indians had treated with whites down about the Cumberland the more desperate savages moved west, while they left some of their tribes who had been friendly to the whites even in their wars with them, and these friendly Indians from the days of Powhatan on continuously up to the days of the American revolution and afterwards settled and remained with the whites on the Cumberland, in settlements of their own, and were called friendly Indians, and as white emmigration pushed west, these friendly Indians moved along with them, or perhaps a few miles in advance of the whites, and these Indians would all go and stay together in settlements of their own, and as has been in all ages, cross of the two races (miscegenation) took place and the off spring of the whites and friendly Indians was dubbed with the name- Melungeon.  

These friendly Indians had all or nearly so, passed into half breed; only a few full blooded ever reached this section and they settled first in Russell and Scott counties, Va., and then many of them on to Newman's Ridge and Blackwater, and many of them now have gone to the mountains of Kentucky, and have formed settlements there.  Some of the Virginia tribe which came here were named Collins, Gibson, Goodman, Bunch and Bolin, and later on there came here from North Carolina others who were dubbed Melungeons, and these were mixed, African and white, and also Indian and African. These settled with the others, and hence a kind of mongrel people.  

Some of them were rich for the time in which they lived and had vast tracts of land and money. Especially rich was old Vardy Collins, who owned four or five square miles on Blackwater, and the noted Vardy Spring.  Around it he built 50 houses for boarders and those who wished to live in them, until they were healed of whatever disease they had.  The people have been misrepresented as savages and outlaws, and an uncertain race of people, but the stories are untrue.  They are kind affable and all of them will treat you as well as they are able.  

This is the history of the Melungeons of Hancock County and the term "Melungeon" and its origin, and these facts your correspondent has gathered from the oldest of the tribes and from those who ought to know.  These people are like all other people, they have among them good and bad people, and not an over percent of the bad, and they have always had the voting franchise the same as the whites. 

If this does not satisfy the minds of the public about this people your correspondent will prepare an article that will do them ample justice.

No Author but fairly sure it is Lewis M Jarvis

Hancock Co., Tennessee