As MHA returns this year to the Melungeon heartland, we welcome a presentation on a unique and little-known figure in the history of far Southwest Virginia, whose family belonged to the same small church as the first recorded Melungeons, in Scott County.
Abijah Alley of Long Hollow
Abijah Alley spent several weeks in heaven conversing with angels in the early 1840s. Back home in Long Hollow, he wrote a book about it. The Alleys were deeply religious people, though many like Abijah and his father Thomas before him never settled comfortably in any denomination. Thomas Alley was received into membership in Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church in 1802, but his religious free thought got him expelled two years later. Abijah became a preacher in his youth, and his seeking and curiosity took him as far west as Ohio and Texas and east to Europe and the Holy Land. He was frequently invited to preach in neighboring churches, and started a sect known as “the little band” that still had adherents in Scott County on the eve of World War II. Somewhere in Long Hollow there should be traces of the home he had built for his family, modeled after Solomon’s temple and surrounded with plants he gathered in the Holy Land.
Nancy Gray Schoonmaker holds a BA in English from Arizona State University and an MA and PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
