Will Allen Dromgoole, The Arena, March 1891
The story of the Melungeons, a sometimes dark-complected people who lived in Tennessee’s Hancock County and surrounding area, has long piqued the interest of both historians and the general public. Legends and disputes abound as to their origin. Over the years they have been variously ascribed backgrounds of Indian, Phoenician, “Welsh” Indian, African American, Carthaginian, or Turkish descent. Some writers have gone so far as to describe them as possible survivors of the Lost Colony of Roanoke or the Lost Tribe of Israel.
Much of the mystery surrounding the Melungeons was created by local color writers from the nineteenth century who visited the Melungeons and wrote titillating, sometimes unflattering, descriptions of them for the enjoyment of their readers and to help promote their magazines. An unknown author, writing in a magazine called Littell’s Living Age, March 1849, said that the Melungeons were “a society of Portuguese Adventurers” who moved to the Tennessee mountains “to be freed from the restraints and drawbacks imposed on them by any form of government” and that they now lived in “a delightful Utopia of their own creation, trampling on the marriage relation, despising all forms of religions, and subsisting upon corn.” Another local color writer, Will Allen Dromgoole, in an 1891 series in The Arena, described them as “a colony of dark-skinned, reddish-brown complexioned people, supposed to be of Moorish descent, who affiliated with neither whites nor blacks, and who called themselves Malungeons, and claimed to be of Portuguese descent.”
Even as late as 1947, an article in The Saturday Evening Post examined the many theories of origin and concluded, “About the people of Newman’s Ridge and Blackwater Swamp just one fact is indisputable: There are such strange people. Beyond that, fact gives way to legendary mystery, and written history is supplanted by garbled stories told a long time ago and half forgotten.”
Court cases in which their origins were called into question have added to the legend. One example is the 1846-47 Hawkins County cases in which eight Melungeon defendants were charged with voting in violation of a state law prohibiting Negroes from voting. Charges were dropped in six of the cases, and the two defendants who actually went to trial were pronounced “not guilty.” In another trial, this time in Chattanooga in 1872, the right of a daughter to inherit her father’s estate was questioned by his family who claimed the girl’s mother was a Negro, and thus prohibited by law from inheritance. The defense lawyer argued that the family was actually Carthaginian or Phoenician, and the jury decision was in favor of the daughter.
Portuguese, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Indian, Negro, white? The debate continues even today. Historical and genealogical research, however, is shedding new light on this centuries-old mystery.
A two-part series in Tennessee Ancestors, will feature articles that will demonstrate how the riddle is being unraveled--generation-by-generation, one family at a time-- by family researchers.
The first in the series is by Pat Spurlock Elder of Kingsport, Tennessee, author of The Melungeons. Pat examines many of the theories and weighs them against current historical and genealogical research. She gives her informed opinion as to the origin of the Melungeons but leaves it open for the reader to decide for him or herself.
The second article is by Jack H. Goins of Rogersville, Tennessee and will appear in the December 2002 issue of Tennessee Ancestors. Jack will outline his research journey as he traced the ancestry and migrations of several of his families, considered to be Melungeon, from the time they arrived in East Tennessee back to their earliest known residences. He is the author of Melungeons and Other Pioneer Families.
Cherel B. Henderson, Editor
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