A Puzzle to Ethnologists

The People of East Tennessee

They are a Puzzle to Ethnologists
and are Called "Malungeons."

The New York Evening Post, 1902

Scotch, Irish and pure English are the types of the majority of the inhabitants of Eastern Tennessee. There are some negroes. The Indians, the Cherokees who once possessed the region have disappeared without leaving perceptible trace. But there is one group, a swart, short, stocky race, of small hands and feet, low cheek bones, small, regular teeth, heavy, straight, course hair, always black, which is distinct from the other types. The speech of this people is guttural and drawling to an extent not observed in the other white mountaineers. The men are given to hunting, fishing and idling, the virtue of industry being monopolized, as a rule, by the women of the group. Agriculturally they excel in growing apples, peaches and grapes. Locally known as "Malungeons," these striking racial survivals are more of less of an ethnological puzzle to the historians of Tennessee. Outside of Claiborne and Hancock counties, where the larger settlements are, similar groups have been found near Rabun Gap, Georgia, and in Sevier County, Tennessee. The theory most commonly accepted in regard to all the "Malungeons," however, is that they are descended from Portuguese colonists for the Western word in the seventeenth century. Several such adventures are recorded of the year 1664, these being a sequence of troubles at home. One fleet, the first to go, was never heard of again, and it is supposed that after a shipwreck the survivors of one of the vessels made their way into the mountains of Tennessee, though what confirmation or the explanation is provided by the traditions of the folk does not appear. Aforetime, the Malungeons were given to the illicit manufacture of liquor and to desperate fighting. It is related of one Betsy Mullins, who built her house on a hill, that she practiced moonshining for years in notorious, open defiance of the law, waxing greatly in wealth and weight. She was immune from arrest, for down the steep mountainside and through the the narrow trails the revenue officers could devise no method of taking a woman of 600 pounds.