Mysterious Melungeons

Larry Stroud
Published Jan. 10, 2007

In 1654, unless someone got the date mixed up, which is always a possibility, English explorers discovered in the Appalachian wilderness a people different from any they knew.

These people were definitely not American Indians, although they had apparently mixed with the native Indians.

They were brown-complexioned, supposed to be of Moorish descent and had European features, often had reddish hair and very distinctive green or blue-green eyes.

They lived in log cabins that had peculiar arched windows.

In April of 1673, James Needham, an Englishman, described the mysterious people as having (quote) a bell which is six foot over which they ring morning and evening and at that time a great number of people congregate together and talk in a language not English nor any Indian dialect.(unquote)

The mysterious people came to be called Melungeons.

These people claimed that they were descended from a group of Portugese who had been shipwrecked or abandoned on the Atlantic coast. Both could be true.

According to English historian David Beer Quinn, in 1586 Sir Francis Drake put ashore several hundred Turkish and Moorish sailors, liberated from the Spanish, on the coast of North Carolina. No trace was found of these people later by ships who stopped there.

Many of those were Sephardic Jews from Spain, Portugal and northern Africa who had converted to Catholicism and may have later converted to the Protestant faith.

And, a fleet of Portuguese ships is known to have wrecked off that same coast in the 1600s, raising the possibility that survivors may have reached shore and made their way inland.

When they first became known, most Melungeons lived in eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia and southern West Virginia.

I became aware of the Melungeons a couple of decades or so ago from an Associated Press article but never felt a need to research this (quote) lost race,(unquote) as some writers fancifully called them, until Dave Perkey and I recently found an unusual carving on a tombstone in a cemetery in a nearby county.

Actually, I had seen the tombstone once before but it was Perkey whose sharp eyes noticed an unusual thing about the carving; it shows a six-fingered hand (actually five fingers and a thumb) clasping a hand with the normal number of digits.

We agreed immediately that no stonecarver would make such a mistake by accident; that the six-fingered hand meant SOMETHING, perhaps a friendship between people predisposed to hexadactylism (having six fingers or six toes) and people with the normal number of fingers.

So I began researching six-fingered people.

Some Melungeons and their descendants, I learned, have six fingers or six toes and may be related to Turks from a specific area of Turkey who traditionally have the same genetic oddity. A family of people in Turkey actually has a surname that when translated into English comes out as Six Fingered Ones.

The mysterious Melungeons and their descendants also often have other physical characteristics that set them apart, including either an Anatolian bump or a ridge called a Central Asian Cranial Ridge on the back of the skull.

Apparently, no one knows what happened to that six foot over bell of 1673, but another characteristic of Melungeon culture is still around. Melungeons are known to have built little houses of stone over graves, and in the cemetery Perkey and I visited, skillfully built little houses made of stone covered three graves of children.

Other unusual physical characteristics are listed on various Web sites containing information on Melungeons; the same sites from which my information came. Just type the word Melungeons into any search engine to find the sites.

But more interesting to me is the list of illnesses to which Melungeons are predisposed; with most or all of these diseases stemming from the Mediterranean area. More on that in an upcoming column.

After the Civil War, when carpetbaggers overran the South, many people from Tennessee, Kentucky and other Melungeon strongholds moved west. When they found the Ozarks, they may have settled down in what was then almost a wilderness but which was similar in terrain to the homes they had just left.

It is not inconceivable that some of us in this area are of Melungeon descent.

Stay tuned.
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Larry Stroud is the associate editor of the Batesville Daily Guard. He can be reached at larrydstroud@yahoo.com or at the Guard office at 793-2383