Welcome to the Melungeon Heritage Association Website

Johnnie Rhea to present March 14^th

at

Genealogy Day

Middlesboro KY

Johnnie Rhea will speak at this event

Her presentation will be:

Life on Newman’s Ridge

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               One January day in 1996, I picked up the Wall Street Journal to find a story headlined "Rural County Balks at Joining Global Village."[2]  It told about Hancock County, Tennessee, which straddles the Clinch River in the ridges hard up against the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet.  This is a county that has lost a third of its 1950 population, which was only ten thousand to begin with.  A third of those left are on welfare, and half of those with jobs have to leave the county to work.  The only town is Sneedville, population 1300, which has no movie theater, no hospital, no dry cleaner, no supermarket, and no department store.

               I read this story with a good deal of interest, because the nearest city of any consequence is my hometown of Kingsport, 35 miles from Sneedville as the crow flies, but an hour and a half on mountain roads.  (If you don't accept my premise that Kingsport is a city of consequence, Knoxville's a little further from Sneedville, in the opposite direction.)

             The burden of the article was that many of Hancock County's citizens are indifferent to the state of Tennessee's desire to hook them up to the information superhighway -- a job which will take some doing, especially for the one household in six that doesn't have a telephone.  The Journal quoted several Hancock Countians to the effect that they didn't see the point.  The reporter observed that the county offers "safe, friendly ways, pristine rivers, unspoiled forests and mountain views," and that many residents simply "like things the way they are."

               So far a typical hillbilly-stereotype story.  But the sentence that really got my attention was this: "Many families here belong to 100 or so Melungeon clans of Portuguese and American Indian descent, who tend to be suspicious of change and have a history of self-reliance."

             Now, I picture the typical Wall Street Journal reader as a harried commuter on the Long Island Railroad, and I wondered what in the world he made of that.  What's this "Melungeon" business?  And what are Portuguese doing up those remote east Tennessee hollers?  You might well ask.

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