Sheboygan
Mercury
September 16, 1848
THE MALUNGEONS
We are free to confess that
we have never heard of or read of the ‘Melungeons’ before this day, and
all we know about them now is what we derive from the following
imperfect description obtained in a letter from a travelling
correspondent of the Louisville, Ky., Examiner. The letter bears
no date, but the site of the Melungen race appears to be somewhere in
Kentucky. The correspondent says;
You must know that
within ten miles of this owl's nest, there is a watering-place, known
hereabouts as 'black-water Springs.' It is situated in a narrow gorge,
scarcely half a mile wide, between Powell's Mountain and the Copper
Ridge, and is, as you may suppose, almost inaccessible. A hundred men
could defend the pass against even a Xerxian army. Now this gorge and
the tops and sides of the adjoining mountains are inhabited by a
singular species of the human animal called MELUNGENS.
The legend of their
history, which they carefully preserve, is this. A great many years
ago, these mountains were settled by a society of Portuguese
Adventurers, men and women--who came from the long-shore parts of
Virginia, that they might be freed from the restraints and drawbacks
imposed on them by any form of government. These people made themselves
friendly with the Indians and freed, as they were from every kind of
social government, they uprooted all conventional forms of society and
lived in a delightful Utopia of their own creation, trampling on the
marriage relation, despising all forms of religion, and subsisting upon
corn (the only possible product of the soil) and wild game of the
woods. These intermixed with the Indians, and subsequently their
descendants (after the advances of the whites into this part of the
state) with the negros and the whites, thus forming the present race of
Melungens. They are tall, straight, well- formed people, of a dark
copper color, with Circassian features, but wooly heads and other
similar appendages of our negro. They are privileged voters in the
state in which they live and thus, you will perceive, are accredited
citizens of the commonwealth. They are brave, but quarrelsome; and are
hospitable and generous to strangers. They have no preachers among them
and are almost without any knowledge of a Supreme Being.
They are married by
the established forms, but husband and wife separate at pleasure,
without meeting any reproach or disgrace from their friends. They are
remarkably unchaste, and want of chastity on the part of females is no
bar to their marrying. They have but little association with their
neighbors, carefully preserving their race, or class, or whatever you
may call it: and are in every respect, save they are under the state
government, a separate and distinct people. Now this is no traveller's
story. They are really what I tell you, without abating or setting down
in aught in malice. They are behind their neighbors in the arts. They
use oxen instead of horses in their agricultural attempts, and their
implements of husbandry are chiefly made by themselves of wood. They
are, without exception, poor and ignorant, but apparently happy.
In the other article published in
Littel's there is the 'story of the dance' that was omitted from this
article. Note both articles have no original date and this
identical article appears in several newspapers in the early 1900s with
no date or reference to the 1848 articles at all.