Appalachian History
If you stand in Vardy Valley on a foggy morning, the mountains almost fold in on you. Newman’s Ridge rises to the south, Powell Mountain to the north, and the narrow strip of bottomland along Blackwater Creek feels like its own small world. For more than two centuries, outsiders have looked into that world and tried to give a name to the people who lived there.
In the nineteenth century white neighbors in Hancock County, Tennessee, derisively called them “Melungeons.” Local attorney Lewis Jarvis explained in 1903 that this was not some ancient tribal name. It was a nickname pinned on the people of Newman’s Ridge and Blackwater by other white residents who thought of them as different and lesser.
Today many descendants have reclaimed the word and built a public heritage around it. Behind the folklore and DNA headlines, though, lies a set of stubborn records: church minutes, tax rolls, land grants, census schedules, missionary reports, and court papers. Taken together, those records tell a quieter story about how an isolated mixed community in the Appalachian borderlands came together, survived, and wrestled with the meanings of race and belonging.
“She Harbored Them Melungins”
The earliest known written use of the word appears far from Newman’s Ridge, in the minutes of Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church in Scott County, Virginia. On a September day in 1813, a church member named Susanna Kitchen brought a complaint against another woman, accusing her of saying that Kitchen “harbored them Melungins.”
The entry is brief and written in the plain language of church discipline, but it is loaded. First, it shows that “Melungins” was already a recognizable label among rural Virginians before 1820, attached to real families who might be visiting neighbors’ homes. Second, the word appears in a setting where church members were policing each other’s morality and respectability. To accuse someone of “harboring” Melungeons was to stain her character by association.
Melungeon researchers have pored over the original Stony Creek church book, now available as a fragile manuscript, microfilm, and typescript through FamilySearch and other repositories. Those minutes have become a foundational document, anchoring later oral traditions about mixed families in the area with a specific date, place, and conflict.
Before Newman’s Ridge: Families On The Virginia Frontier
By the time Sister Kitchen stood up in Stony Creek, the surnames that would later define the Melungeon story were already scattered across the upper Holston and Clinch country. Tax lists and county records from Russell and Scott Counties in Virginia in the early 1800s show free families with names like Gibson, Collins, Moore, Goins, Bunch, and others living alongside white and Black neighbors.
Some of these households were identified in the records as “free people of color” or otherwise marked as nonwhite. Others simply appeared by name and acreage. Later genealogical and genetic work suggests that many of these families descended from colonial free people of color in Virginia and the Carolinas who carried tangled mixtures of European, African, and Native ancestry into the mountains.
County court minutes, deed books, and tax rolls held today at the Library of Virginia allow researchers to track how these families moved through the region, intermarried, and gradually crossed the state line into what would become Hawkins and Hancock Counties, Tennessee. Even without the word Melungeon on the page, you can see the skeleton of the later community forming in these routine county records.
Vardemon Collins And A Ridge Becomes Home
The ridge country that would become the heart of “Melungeon” territory came into sharper focus in the early nineteenth century. Hawkins County, Tennessee, organized in 1787, covered a large stretch of the Holston and Clinch valleys. Within that county, one name in particular has become central to the story: Vardemon or Vardy Collins.
Land records show Collins and his kin gaining footholds in several frontier counties, including early grants in North Carolina and later entries in what became Hawkins County. One 1816 Tennessee land grant, recorded in Hawkins County and based on an older North Carolina military certificate, placed Vardemon Collins on Newman’s Ridge itself, on land previously claimed by Revolutionary veteran John Wolf.
Those grants and related deeds, preserved today in the Hawkins County register’s office and on microfilm at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, are important for more than just genealogy. They place a member of what later writers would call a “Melungeon” family squarely on the narrow mountain ridge that runs above Blackwater Creek and Vardy Valley. Once Collins and related families were established there, other kin and neighbors followed.
By the 1840s, when Hancock County was carved from Hawkins and Claiborne Counties, much of Newman’s Ridge and the adjoining Blackwater valley fell within the new county’s lines. Deed books, tax rolls, and local court records from those years show a cluster of Collins, Gibson, Goins, Mullins, and other families concentrated on the ridge and in the narrow hollows below.
Counting, Classifying, And “Free People Of Color”
Federal census schedules give another view of the community. In the mid nineteenth century enumerators recorded the people of Hawkins, Hancock, and surrounding counties under rigid racial categories that were supposed to sort residents into “white,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “Indian.” For the families on Newman’s Ridge and in nearby settlements, those labels shifted over time.
Digitized census transcriptions and images for Hancock County between 1850 and 1880 show Collins, Gibson, Goins, and related households sometimes listed as “mulatto” or “free people of color,” sometimes as “black,” and eventually, in many cases, as “white.”
Those moving labels reflected both the changing legal landscape and local perceptions. In an era when southern states were tightening restrictions on people of mixed ancestry, being recorded as “free colored” could mean limited political rights, obstacles to land ownership, and vulnerability to racist violence. Later, as Reconstruction receded and racial lines hardened in different ways, some ridge families seem to have slipped across the color line in the census, even as neighbors still treated them as set apart.
To read those pages today is to watch the state trying to pin a single racial category onto people whose ancestry and community ties defied simple boxes.
Outsider Eyes: Burnett, Dromgoole, And The Melungeon Image
By the late nineteenth century, the people of Newman’s Ridge and Blackwater were no longer just names in tax rolls and census columns. Travelers, journalists, and scholars began to turn them into a story for national audiences.
In 1889 physician Swan M. Burnett published “A Note on the Melungeons” in American Anthropologist. Drawing on travel impressions and local talk, he sketched the ridge community as a curious, isolated group of mixed ancestry whose origins baffled neighbors.
A year later, Tennessee writer Will Allen Dromgoole rode into the mountains to see the “strange people” for herself. In a series of articles for the Nashville Daily American and the Boston Arena, she presented the Melungeons as a degraded, almost tragic community whose supposed Portuguese or “Moorish” blood made them neither fully white nor Black.
Modern readers and descendants rightly bristle at Dromgoole’s language. Her portraits were soaked in the racial prejudices of her time and helped cement stereotypes that would linger for generations. Yet they also froze small details about daily life on Newman’s Ridge that would otherwise be lost: the shape of cabins, the work people did, the way neighbors talked about schooling and marriage.
Local attorney Lewis Jarvis offered a different sort of outsider account. Writing in the Hancock County Times in 1903, he insisted that the name Melungeon had been applied by other white residents as an insult and that the ridge people themselves did not claim it as a tribal identity. He pointed to traditions that some families were already in the mountains when white settlers arrived and others that traced them to mixed Indian, African, and European ancestry.
Taken together, these outsider accounts do not settle the question of origins. Instead, they show how white Tennesseans used the word “Melungeon” to police racial boundaries and how national readers learned to imagine a mysterious “tri racial isolate” in the hills.
“They Have Been Derisively Dubbed”: Life In Vardy And Blackwater
If Dromgoole and Burnett captured the ridge community at a moment of curiosity and scorn, the story of Vardy Mission and School reveals a different kind of encounter.
In the 1890s the Presbyterian Church launched a small mission in the Blackwater valley, near the heart of what outsiders already considered “Melungeon country.” Over the next several decades, the Vardy mission complex grew to include a church, manse, schoolhouse, library, and housing for teachers and students.
Mission reports, letters, and photographs preserved in the Presbyterian Historical Society and the Archives of Appalachia show teachers wrestling with poverty, isolation, and the stigma attached to their students. The mission staff rarely used the word Melungeon in official reports, but they focused explicitly on serving the mixed families on Newman’s Ridge and along Blackwater Creek.
A 1984 National Register nomination for the Vardy Community School Historic District traced how the mission school became a center of community life, offering basic education, religious instruction, and rudimentary health care for ridge children in an era when county schools were segregated and underfunded. The mission operated until the mid 1950s, when the county absorbed the school after Brown v. Board of Education.
Nearby, the cabin of Mahala “Big Haley” Mullins, a famed Melungeon moonshiner who died in 1898, became its own kind of landmark. Her log house, once perched high on Newman’s Ridge and said to be too heavy and awkward to move when federal agents came calling, was relocated to the Vardy historic site around 2000. Today it stands alongside the church and school ruins as a tangible reminder of the ridge community’s stubborn independence and the stories outsiders tell about them.
DNA, Demography, And The Problem Of Origin Stories
For much of the twentieth century, popular writers spun elaborate myths about Melungeon origins. Depending on the book or newspaper clipping, the ridge people were said to be the descendants of Portuguese sailors, shipwrecked Spaniards, “lost” Turks, mysterious Carthaginians, or a stray colony of Welsh Indians. Many of those tales rested on thin evidence and a desire to find an exotic European explanation for a visibly mixed community in the Jim Crow South.
By the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, a combination of archival digging and genetic testing began to undercut the more romantic stories. In a widely cited study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy, Roberta Estes, Jack Goins, Penny Ferguson, and J. Mac McDowell combined Y DNA and mtDNA results from Melungeon descendants with courthouse research in Hawkins, Hancock, and surrounding counties. They concluded that the core Melungeon families were a multi ethnic population rooted primarily in free people of color from Virginia and the Carolinas who carried European, African, and Native American ancestry into the mountains.
Wayne Winkler’s book Walking Toward the Sunset pulled together earlier scholarship, oral history, and new DNA evidence to argue that the Melungeons of Newman’s Ridge are best understood alongside other mixed communities in the South such as the Lumbee, Redbones, and Turks of South Carolina.
The Tennessee Encyclopedia entry on Melungeons, written by Ann Toplovich, reflects this newer consensus. It emphasizes that “Melungeon” began as an insult applied by outsiders to people perceived as racially ambiguous and that no known group historically called itself by that name. Only in recent decades have some descendants embraced Melungeon as an ethnic label, forming organizations such as the Melungeon Heritage Association and hosting “Unions” that blend family reunions with academic conferences.
Memory, Identity, And The Ridge Today
Walk through Vardy today and you move through overlapping layers of history. The Vardy Community Historical Society maintains the former Presbyterian church as a museum and meeting place. The relocated Mahala Mullins cabin stands nearby. Visitors can still drive the steep switchbacks over Newman’s Ridge and look down into the valley that once felt so unreachable.
In local newspapers, television features, and oral history projects, modern descendants tell their own versions of the Melungeon story. Some emphasize kinship ties and pride in a resilient community that survived poverty, prejudice, and official neglect. Others are wary of the word, remembering it mainly as a slur. Academic writers point out that the Melungeon case reveals how the South’s racial system never fit neatly into a simple Black and white binary, especially in mountain districts where small communities of mixed ancestry could carve out space on the margins.
The primary sources at the heart of that story are often humble. A church minute book where a woman is scolded for “harboring” the wrong guests. A worn deed book showing that Vardemon Collins took up land on a narrow ridge in 1816. Census pages dotted with the word “mulatto” that later quietly shift to “white.” Mission school reports from Vardy that tally children’s ages and attendance alongside laments about muddy roads and scarce shoes.
Together, they remind us that the people who came to be labeled Melungeons were never just the stuff of rumor and legend. They were neighbors, landowners, tenants, moonshiners, church members, and schoolchildren who navigated the same mountains we drive through today. The label may have changed, and in some cases been proudly reclaimed, but the ridge and valley that shaped their lives still stand as one of Appalachia’s most revealing borderland communities.
Sources and further reading
Minutes of Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church, Scott County, Virginia, including the 1813 entry in which Sister Kitchen complained that another woman said she “harbored them Melungins,” available via FamilySearch and transcribed in modern Melungeon research blogs. vancehawkins.blogspot.com+2jackgoins.blogspot.com+2
Russell, Scott, Hawkins, and Hancock County land, tax, and court records documenting Collins, Gibson, Goins, Mullins, and related families in the upper Holston and Clinch region and on Newman’s Ridge, including the 1816 land grant to Vardemon Collins on Newman’s Ridge. jogg.info+3choicemn.com+3carolyndavidsonhicks.com+3
Nineteenth and early twentieth century descriptive accounts such as Swan M. Burnett’s “A Note on the Melungeons” in American Anthropologist, Will Allen Dromgoole’s Melungeon articles in the Nashville Daily American and Boston Arena, and Lewis Jarvis’s 1903 Hancock County Times piece “The Inhabitants of Newman’s Ridge and Blackwater in Hancock County, Tenn.” jogg.info+5JSTOR+5Public Anthropology+5
Vardy Mission and Vardy Community School records and interpretations, including the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Vardy Community School Historic District, modern summaries of the mission’s history, and local features on the Mahala Mullins cabin and Vardy Community Historical Society. NPGallery+2Wikipedia+2
Modern scholarship and syntheses such as Wayne Winkler’s Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia, Roberta Estes et al., “Melungeons, A Multi Ethnic Population” in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy, Ann Toplovich’s “Melungeons” entry in the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, and overviews in NCpedia and related guides that place the Newman’s Ridge community within broader studies of mixed ancestry groups in the American South. Wikipedia+5mupress.org+5goodreads.com+5