Links of Interest Expanded

Several new links of interest have been added recently. If it has been a while since you paid the "Links of Interest" portal a visit, you might want to take a look. The portal is in the sidebar immediately above MHS Blog Archives. Click on the link at the bottom of the list of links to return to the MHS Blog home page.

Descendants of Vardy Collins Redux

Descendants of Vardy Collins
Compiled by Kevin Mullins
Updated as of September, 2008

Generation No. 1

1. VARDY1 COLLINS was born 1764 in Grayson Co., VA, and died Bef. 1860 in Hancock Co, TN. He married PEGGY GIBSON. She was born Abt. 1773 in NC, and died Aft. 1850 in Hancock Co, TN.

Notes for VARDY COLLINS:

Vardy has been called the "patriarch of the Melungeons", and has been speculated to have been one of the first settlers in the Newmans Ridge/Blackwater area. But a check of the records indicates that Vardy may not have arrived in Hawkins/Hancock Co until ca 1810. There were other Collins and Gibsons in S.W. VA and E. TN earlier than 1810, but I'm not sure whether they were in the Newmans Ridge/Blackwater area. He was in Wilkes Co, NC in 1790, according to the census. He was listed in the Ashe Co, NC census in 1800, and in Hawkins Co, TN in 1810.

To read more: Click Here.

Before you do, however, Kevin has asked me to stress that as extensive as it is, his research is a work in progress and is always subject to change by further research, and that no research published on the web should be taken as authoritative in itself but rather as a pointer to the primary sources, which should always be consulted before reaching any conclusions.

That is good advice in regard to anything you see on the web, and especially in regard to Melungeons, about so much misinformation has been so widely distributed.

Old Thomas Collins of Flatt River

Written and Compiled by Jack Goins, MHS VP for Heritage

According to documented family research, old Thomas Collins Sr., born before 1710, was the father and/or grandfather of the historical Tennessee Melungeon Collins. At least one of Thomas Collins parents was probably full blood Saponi Indian. Collins family history handed down from father to son was, "The Collins were living in Virginia as Indians before they migrated to North Carolina, and they stole the name Collins from white settlers" ( Will Allen Dromgoole's 1890 interview with Calloway Collins, quoted in Melungeons And Other Pioneer Families.)

To read the story of Thomas Collins and his descendants: Click Here.

Will Allen Dromgoole

Tennessee author and poetess Will Allen Dromgoole played a pivotal role in Melungeon historiography thanks to four newspaper articles about Melungeons written by her in 1890 and 1891 and published in the Nashville Daily American and the Boston Arena. The accuracy of these accounts is debatable, to say the least, but for good or ill they constituted the first widespread reporting about the Melungeons and influenced later authors, making no study of the Melungeons complete without them.

To read about the life of Will Allen Dromgoole: Click Here.

To read the four articles:

• "The Melungeon Tree and Its Four Branches"
• “Land of The Malungeons”
• "The Malungeons"
• "A Strange People"

Click Here.

September 26, 1813

"Church sat in love. Brother Kilgore, Moderator. Then came forward Sister Kitchen and complained to the church against Susanna Stallard for saying she harbored them Melungins. Sister Sook said she was hurt with her for believing her child and not believing her, and she won't talk to her to get satisfaction, and both is "pigedish", one against the other. Sister Sook lays it down and the church forgives her. Then came forward Cox and relates to the church that he went to the Association and took the letter and they received the letter in fellowship. Dismissed."

Minutes of the Stony Creek Baptist Church
Fort Blackmore, Scott County VA

Discovered by MHS Vice-President for Heritage, Jack Goins, this is the earliest known written reference to Melungeons.

Calvin Beale Passes Away

Obituary by MHS President Wayne Winkler

Calvin Beale, who was one of first researchers to scientifically examine the phenomenon of Melungeons and other mixed ethnic populations, died on September 2 after a bout with colon cancer. He was 85 years old.

Calvin Lunsford Beale was born June 6, 1923, in Washington and was a graduate of the city's Wilson Teachers College. Fascinated by geography from childhood, he found a job in the map department of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, during World War II.

While working at the Census Bureau in the late 1940s, he did graduate work in the new field of demography at the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin. He received a master's degree from Wisconsin for his life's work in 1981.

The "Los Angeles Times" reports, "His most renowned discovery came in the late 1960s, when he noticed that people were beginning to trickle back to the countryside after 150 years of steady migration to cities. When he published evidence of what became known as the "population turnaround," academics scoffed. "No one believed him when he first started talking about it," said USDA colleague John Cromartie, "but later surveys bore him out."

For more than five decades, he continued to travel to distant outposts in all 50 states to take the measure of the people who live there. Of the nation's 3,141 counties, he visited almost 2,500. In each one, he took a picture of the county courthouse, interviewed local residents and recorded meticulous notes. Many of his photographs can be found on a USDA website.

To view them: Click Here.

Beale worked for the U. S. Census Bureau in the late 1940s in preparation for the 1950 census. Beale and at least one other colleague had noticed that many of the families identified in William Gilbert's work on remnant Indian tribes had been classified inconsistently from census to census. After the census was taken, Beale had access to every portfolio of census returns and, using the family names noted by Gilbert, began examining how these families were classified ethnically.

After the 1950 census, Beale went to work for the U. S. Department of Agriculture but continued to study Melungeons and mixed-ethnic populations on his own. In 1957 he published an article entitled "American Triracial Isolates: Their Status and Pertinence to Genetic Research." The magazine was "Eugenics Quarterly," and in 2003 Beale told me, "I wish that I didn't have to say it was in 'Eugenics Quarterly' - not because 'Eugenics Quarterly' was a bad journal. It was as very reputable journal...But 'eugenics' had become a bad word, particularly after World War Two, and it wasn't more than a couple more years before the journal took a different name."

I met Calvin Beale at a Melungeon gathering in 2003. My prepared talk was on the work of William Gilbert, Edward Price, and Calvin Beale, whom I considered the pioneers in research on multi-ethnic populations. A couple of hours before my presentation, someone told me Calvin Beale was in the audience. I went to meet him and his first words to me were, "I'll bet you thought I was dead by now." Needless to say, I was very pleased that I had written complimentary things about his work and we stayed in touch over the years.

To see Calvin Beale with Wayne Winkler in 2004: Click Here.

Beale coined the term "triracial isolates" as a synoptic of all the multi-ethnic groups. "And I limited myself only to those who had, either by self-identity or local ascription, three races - whether or not any individuals in [those groups] were necessarily of tri-racial descent." Beale believed that these groups "seem to have formed through miscegenation between Indians, whites, and Negroes - slave or free - in the Colonial and early Federal periods."

In 2004, Beale told a Melungeon gathering, "In July of 1969, I read a small item in a newspaper about the Melungeons opening an outdoor drama in Sneedville. It so happened that I had some business in Oak Ridge at this time. So the day after I finished that, I drove up to Sneedville, found the amphitheatre, and got a ticket. I also asked whether there was anyone in town who might be willing to show me around some. Claude Collins was mentioned. So I contacted him and he was gracious enough to take me for a drive up on Newman's Ridge, to the Vardy School, and up Snake hollow. I also asked about a place to stay overnight and was able to get one of the two motel rooms above the beauty parlor.

"That night, before the play, there was a lobby at the amphitheatre with craft items on sale. I wanted to take home some small souvenirs and gifts and stood contemplating some homemade soaps. I must have done so for more than just a moment. Presently, I heard a voice from somewhere in back and I think somewhat above me say, "Mr. Beale, are you planning on taking a bath?" It was Claude Collins.

"There was a big audience for the play. I remember having a rather so-so reaction to the first act that pictured the Melungeons' rather prosperous early period in the area, although they were regarded as people whose origin was unknown. But the second act, set much later and with its star-crossed love story between a Melungeon girl and the son of a prominent businessman who covets Melungeon land, was very skilfully done, and by the end there were hardly any dry eyes in the house, my own included.

"That trip was nearly the last research excursion that I took relating to the triracial populations, as my interests seemed to turn to other things. Life was rapidly changing for the groups, as it was for the country in general. The Civil Rights era had ended the separate school systems many groups had that had both limited and sustained their status. It was the time of television and much better roads, and a greatly diminished role for farm work. By '69, there were large numbers of people from every group who had dispersed to the cities to work. The Melungeons, in effect, had a big coming-out party and said, 'Yes, we're Melungeons. So what?'"

From the Los Angeles Times: What may be even more remarkable is that Beale never charged his trips to a government expense account. He paid for everything -- airline tickets, car rentals and hotels -- out of his own pocket. "The taxpayers got their money's worth from Calvin, and then some," said David L. Brown, a former colleague who now teaches at Cornell University. Beale, who never married, lived in Washington his entire life -- and had no desire to live anywhere else. He followed baseball closely and was his office's resident movie expert, but mostly he devoted his life to his work, studying maps, the ever-changing numbers on census reports and the lives those numbers represented. In the words of his nephew, Richard Beale, "He's the only person I've ever known who, on his deathbed, said he should have spent more time at the office.'"

To read the New York Times' obituary in its entirety: Click Here.

Myth Making Amid the Mountains

Just as many myths about the Melungeons have been created, told and retold by amateurs, myths about Appalachia have been created, told and retold by professionals. This paper examines some of these academic myths and their ramifications:

Appalachian Culture and Economic Development

Ronald L. Lewis
West Virginia University
Dwight B. Billings
University of Kentucky

Journal of Appalachian Studies 1997;3(1):43–69

Abstract: For almost as long as commentators, reformers, and policy makers have worried about how to improve income, living conditions, and human welfare in the southern mountain region of the United States, a significant relationship is assumed to exist between the culture of those who live in Appalachia and the prospects for the region's economic development. Indeed, assumptions about the distinctiveness of Appalachian culture influence the very presumption that Appalachia is in fact a discrete region with a distinctive culture even though most Americans would scoff at the notion of a Rocky Mountain culture or an Adirondac culture.

A central theme in much of the vast popular and scholarly literature about Appalachia contends that deficiencies in mountain culture have contributed to, or at least reinforced, economic backwardness and poverty. Although the myth which links cultural deficiency and economic underdevelopment in Appalachia has been evolving for a century, a large body of literature written by regional scholars during the past twenty-five years, along with a reappraisal of earlier studies, demonstrates a far more complex relationship between Appalachian culture and economic development past and present than previously imagined.

In this paper we will first examine a set of once powerful beliefs about Appalachian culture and its presumed impact on economic development, and then assess existing evidence supporting those interpretations. The assumptions and beliefs include such concepts as isolationism, homogeneity, familism, and fundamentalism. These and a variety of corollary concepts grew out of a popular mythology which came to be accepted and then reified by professionals whose works were influential during the 1960s and 1970s and still influence theory and policy analysis today. The validity of these beliefs, many of which eventually calcified into stereotypes, were challenged during the period of social activism which has flourished throughout Appalachia since the 1970s. The intellectual ferment among activists, scholars, educators, writers, and artists throughout the region during this period has significantly deepened our understanding of the great diversity in Appalachia's geography, history, cultural resources, forms of social and political participation, and its relationship with the national and global markets.

This paper examines how this new knowledge of Appalachian history and culture either modifies or rejects earlier models and perspectives on the relationship between culture and economic development in Appalachia, and will postulate what the newer approaches imply for future economic development strategies and policy-making.

To read the entire paper: Click Here. (Adobe Acrobat or other PDF reader required.)