Excise tax on bottled soft drinks, syrups and dry mixtures; disposition thereof. Its post office is closed in 1935. How far from Flatwoods , ky? They were like any other 1800s family except theyliked inbreeding. There was a Zachariah Fugate who was married to a Mary Smith; both carried the gene which resulted in blue children. his wife happened to be a carrier for the gene, so in turn about half of their children were blue. It was painful. Having blue children did not concern them. Stacy counts Fugate blood in his own veins. Her name was Ruth Pendergrass, and she had been trying to stir up medical interest in the blue people ever since a dark blue woman walked into the county health department one bitterly cold afternoon and asked for a blood test. They were delighted., They changed colors! remembered Pendergrass. Martin and Elizabeth Fugates blue children multiplied in this natural isolation tank. Like this guy: Most of the Blue Fugates died off, hopefully because they decided to give the incest a rest for a while, and so its not often that one runs into a blue person on the street anymore. Martin Fugate, who was orphaned as a child in France, began the American Fugate clan. The company's principal address is Tuckers Run Rd . The doctor gave each blue family a supply of methylene blue tablets to take as a daily pill. So I knew we had the defect defined.. At 30%, nausea, difficulty breathing, and an elevated heart rate start to appear. Stumped, the doctor turned to the medical literature for a clue. Buckhannon is a town thats 95% white, where 3 out of 10 people didnt graduate from high school. However, it has the ability to change the blue hemoglobin back to a normal color, and remove the blue tone from their skin almost instantly. "There is a clan of partly-colored people in Barbour County often called Guineas, under the erroneous presumption that they are Guinea negroes," observed WV historian Hu Maxwell in the 1890s. The only real picture is of a man who turned himself blue by eating silver. History Timeline of the Native Indians of West Virginia. And they married the people who lived closest to them, the Combses, Smiths, Ritchies, and Stacys. Stacy courted her, married her, and moved over from Troublesome Creek to make a living in timber on her daddys land. His two room log cabin sits in the middle of Laurel Fork Hollow. Born Jan. 16, 1869, in Marion County, Ephraim Franklin Morgan went on to become one of West Virginia's governors. Called methaemoglobinaemia (commonly known as met-H), the condition reduces the individuals ability to carry oxygen in their blood. Comet C/2022 E3 was first discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a public-private partnership aimed at a systematic study of the optical night sky. Benjamin Stacy was the last of the Fugate family members to have blue skin and lived a healthy life. Additional comment actions. The Blue People of Kentucky were first diagnosed with methemoglobinemia in the 1960s by Dr. Madison Cawein, a noted hematologist. Dont freak out. Wingspan: 6.3-8.3 in (Black-Capped), 5.9-7.9 in (Carolina) Chickadees are tiny little birds that are very easy to recognize because of their "black cap" and black bib. Methemoglobinemia is a rare hereditary blood disorder that results from excess levels of methomoglobin (metHb) in the blood. The number of tobacco stores per capita (we call it the chew factor) is the highest in West Virginia here in Charles Town. Funding was made available through a $75 million facilities bond, $25 million in private donations through the Mountaineer Athletic Club and $6 million from West Virginia's multimedia rights contract with IMG. It can make a claim that it should top this list, since it has the most people. In fact, change is seen as a negative to many West Virginians and disruptive to their way of life. Its common. During the same time period, missionaries reported pervasive ignorance and poverty, with large families living together in ramshackle cabins. Because the boy was intensely blue at birth but then recovered his normal skin tones, Benjy is assumed to have inherlted only one gene for the condition. While not every Fugate child was born with the condition, as genes express themselves differently in different people, enough were that locals began to take notice. West Virginia, constituent state of the United States of America. All rights reserved. Answer (1 of 3): Depends on what you mean by blue. After a 1997 survey, the boundary line between Jefferson County, West Virginia, and Loudoun County, Virginia, was declared to be the watershed line of the top of the ridge of the Blue Ridge mountains, as documented in the survey. He was a French orphan who knew nothing of his lineage. The Blue Ridge Mountains In West Virginia Were Named One Of The 50 Most Beautiful Places In The World We all know the Blue Ridge Mountains in West Virginia are stunning, and it's about time the rest of the world took notice. After analyzing all cities with a decent amount of people in them, we came up with this list as The Most Redneck Cities in West Virginia: Many of these are types of places where old redneck ladies drive their motorized wheelchairs down the middle of town, towing their grandkids in a wagon. In the isolated hollows of rural Kentucky, they were known as the blue Fugates and the blue Combses. All Rights ReservedPrivacy Policy |Terms of Use, Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis, 1870 Census Index, North Carolina and South Carolina, 1870 Census Index, Virginia and West Virginia, 1870 Census Index, Margaret Christine Otis Baker: A Colonial Woman with an Incredible Story, Carter Braxton: The Signers of the Declaration of Independence, Josiah Bartlett: The Signers of the Declaration of Independence, Everything You Need to Know About the 1890 US Federal Census, The Real Truth Behind Coats of Arms and Family Crests, Curtis King: Unsung Heroes of the Civil War. Rattini is accused of distributing narcotic painkillers illegally to more than 200 pharmacies across West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee. She was a sister to one of the Fugate women. About this same time, another of the blue Combses, named Luke, had taken his sick wife up to the clinic at Lexington. But by 3 years old and . He found references to methemoglobinemia dating to the turn of the century, but it wasnt until he came across E. M. Scotts 1960 report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (vol. Everyone knew the blue Fugates were healthy people. Feb. 22, 2012 -- Benjamin "Benjy" Stacy so frightened maternity doctors with the color of his skin -- "as Blue as Lake Louise" -- that he was rushed just hours after his birth in 1975 to . Others, however, did not like being blue, and it was these Fugates, who didnt like their blue coloring, who were the first to volunteer for Caweins experimental treatments. Book is out of print, borrowed from Special Collections at the St. Louis County Library, St. Louis, MO. Benjy was a pretty big item in the hospital, his mother says with a grin. June 18, 2015. The female's primary color is light cinnamon with darker-colored wings. Informant: "So, what my brother told me is that there's a story that there are people in the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, near the campus I guess, and there is skin is blue. The enzyme eventually builds to normal levels in most children and to almost normal levels in those like Benjy, who carry one gene. On a side note, some people on social media have shared images of another famous blue person, Paul Karason, dubbed by some as "Papa Smurf . Many of us have college degrees, are nurses, teachers, preachers and well-educated women. Cawein, in researching the family lines in Perry County, Kentucky and with the help of Fugate Family Bibles, found in fact, that the Fugates had married Fugates, had married first cousins, and had intermarried with families whose surnames were: Combs, Smith, Ritchie, and Stacy. *. Give the gift of knowledge with our official 'did you know' book. It is home to so much creativity, and has been a place of devastating poverty. Cawein got lucky when a brother and sister named Patrick and Rachel Ritchie walked into a Hazard County clinic. The story of an Appalachian malady, an inquisitive doctor, and a paradoxical cure. After concluding that there was no evidence of heart disease, I said Aha! I started asking them questions: Do you have any relatives who are blue? then I sat down and we began to chart the family., Cawein remembers the pain that showed on the Ritchie brothers and sisters faces. 1:52. 8 November 2021. Martin and Elizabeth had seven children, four being born blue; Zachariah, who was blue, married his mother's sister. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[580,400],'roadsnacks_net-medrectangle-3','ezslot_0',606,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-roadsnacks_net-medrectangle-3-0');Using that criteria, its not hard to scrape the internet, run some scientific data on where rednecks might live in West Virginia, and then put out a list. Somebody with only one gene would not have the condition but could pass the gene to a child. In people with methemoglobinemia, the skin appears blue because the veins beneath the skin are coursing with dark blue blood. Curiosity drove him to Hazard where he was introduced to a nurse, Ruth Pendergrass, who had met a "dark blue" woman. The Blue Fugates have essentially now gone from reality to legend. They have the 2nd most bars and the 2nd most trailer/mobile home parks per capita in the state. You know theres lots of rednecks here when you look at the numbers. Cawein drew lots of blood from the Ritchies and hurried back to his lab. Luna has been dead nearly 20 years now, but her widower survives. Had you guys just ditched school even more, you might have won this whole thing. As travel became easier, more people moved into and out of the Fugates area of Kentucky, including some actual Fugates. One of the girls, the Informant, was discussing an upcoming trip to visit her brother at West Virginia University. Her name was Ruth Pendergrass, and she had been trying to stir up medical interest in the blue people ever since a dark blue woman walked into the county health department one bitterly cold afternoon and asked for a blood test. 5 years ago when I was on a swingerparty she got pregnant with me. That total makes West Virginia the 38th most populous state in the country. Blow your mind. She was as blue a woman as I ever saw.. T he West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has emerged as one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the passing of Joe Biden's ambitious domestic agenda, declaring he will vote against a key voting. Theres lots of trucks in Grafton, WV. Several familes moved elsewhere after being bought out. She shuns modern conveniences. ELVIS SEEN AT GRACELAND ON HIS 85th BIRTHDAY! by F. William Sunderman, J.B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia PA, 1964. The doctor was recently approached by the producers of the television show Thats Incredible. They wanted to parade the blue people across the screen in their weekly display of human oddities. It wasn't always this way. Genetic Causes Intermarrying with people other than close relatives meant the likelihood of any Fugate descendant being born with the condition reduced. Legend has it that Martin himself may have had a blue tinge to his skin, but not the dark blue color of later Fugates. He helped isolate an antidote for cholera, and he did some of the early work on L-dopa, the drug for Parkinsons disease. 1995-2022 Ancestral Findings, LLC. avg. The condition that made the Fugates blue causes large amounts of methemoglobin (which is a blue type of hemoglobin) to circulate in the blood. Generations later, a descendant of Martin Fugate, Benjy Stacy, would be born "blue". Its nothing.. They took the doctor to see their uncle, who was blue, too. Population: 5,626High school graduation rate: 72%Gun stores per capita: 5th in WVFishing/bait per capita: 3rd in the state. If their blood had a lower concentration of methemoglobin, they might only blush blue in cold weather, while people with higher concentrations of methemoglobin were bright blue from head to toe. The topographic boundary was modified where Route 9 crossed the watershed divide. So, hold our beers and watch this. Published November 21, 2021 Updated November 29, 2021 For nearly 200 years, the Fugates known as the blue people of Kentucky remained largely sealed off from the outside world as they passed their blue skin from generation to generation. there is no "blue-soloution" that turns them back to a "normal" color. Despite those incredible odds, this is exactly what happened with the Fugates. One of em I remember seeing him when I was just a boy Blue Anze, they called him. Research on intrafamilial marriage in such enclaves is slim. The blue skin gene is a recessive gene that only appears when both parents are carriers of the gene. The 2010 survey revealed that there were 1,852,994 people living in West Virginia, which represented a modest rise of just 2.5% on the numbers declared at the 2000 census. Yep, thats right. The Fugate family intermarried with a neighbouring family for generations, which led to a relatively pure gene pool, often including the met-H gene. Blah. "They were bluer'n hell," said Cawein in a 1982 interview with Science 82. A nearby family who the early Fugates married into quite extensively also carried the gene. Fortunately, Cawein was able to find an antidote for the blood disorder - methylene blue which acted as an electron donor. You might actually call Hurricane home of the rednecks with paychecks. Martin Fugate was a French orphan who emigrated to Kentucky in 1820 to claim a land grant on the wilderness banks of Troublesome Creek. Most of them old people went by that name the blue Fugates. Blood is also likely to be a chocolate brown color instead of bright red in patients with methemoglobinemia. One came from a blue Flugate whod joined the Army and been sent to Panama, where his son was born bright blue. One could inherit the gene, not get the blood disorder, but pass the gene on to a child. At last they were free of their "blue" shade and were no longer embarrassed. Laurel Wheeler and family, Buena Vista, Rockbridge County, Virginia. Rednecks love to shoot their guns and fish, and there are a really high number of ammo stores and bait shops in the area, per person. Blood cells always looked so beautiful to me, he says. The railroad didnt come through eastern Kentucky until the coal mines were developed around 1912, and it took another 30 or 40 years to lay down roads along the local creeks. In 2014, the lowest-cost bronze plan in the WV exchange was an average of $280/month, higher than the national average of $249. Elkins is way out in the middle of nowhere south of Morgantown, at the base of the Appalachians. We just have our own way of life. The state capital is Charleston. Plus, we thought why not add in a few stereotypes? In most people, there is an enzyme present called diaphorase that converts methemoglobin back into a usable form of hemoglobin. And by God, they didnt have the enzyme diaphorase. If youll notice, he observes, tracing lines on his familys chart, which lists his mothers and his fathers great grandfather as Henley Fugate, Im kin to myself.. The Appalachian region of the US is a beautiful place with a rich and sometimes tragic history. Population: 10,486Mobile home parks in area: 3rd in WVBars per capita: 3rdGun stores per capita: 5th in West Virginia. Have you ever heard of the blue people of Kentucky? The clinic doctors only saw her a few times in her life and never for anything serious. Trudging up and down the hollows, fending off the two mean dogs that everyone had in their front yard, the doctor and the nurse would spot someone at the top of a hill who looked blue and take off in wild pursuit. Studying the problem, Cawein figured out that he could convert methemoglobin to hemoglobin without the enzyme. Cawein would have no part of it, and he related with glee the news that a film crew sent to Kentucky from Hollywood fled the two mean dogs in every front yard without any film. The couple had eight children, including Luna. One of the supermarket tabloids once sent a reporter to find out about the blue people, and she was distressed with his preoccupation with intermarriages. Apparently, it shows more easily when theyre cold!. One look at Luke was enough to get those doctors down here in a hurry, says Pendergrass, who joined Cawein to look for more blue people. get your facts straight for petes sake. Population: 7,164 Mobile home parks per capita: 2nd in West Virginia Bars per capita: 2nd in the state Walmart rank: 3rd Elkins is way out in the middle of nowhere south of Morgantown, at the base of the Appalachians. RoadSnacks is reader-supported. Then he began to construct the family genealogy and traced their roots back to Martin and Elizabeth Fugate. Their inbreeding led to several medical problems and recessive genes being passed down through each child, such as one that gave some of the offspring blue skin. Using Yelp and Google Maps, this is the criteria we used: Note: For the sake of getting reliable numbers, we counted places within a citys border, as well as within a short driving distance. However, the disorder didn't seem to cause any special health problems. At the National Press Club on Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney noted that his maternal grandmother is descended from someone named Cheney, then quipped, So we had Cheneys on both sides of the familyand we dont even live in West Virginia. (Click here for a video.) Little did they know that their union would create shades of blue people! Definitely not a poaching bunch, these Hurricane rednecks. martin fugate was blue from birth, which has nothing to do with inbreeding. This brief history has been gleaned from old family records, correspondence with other members, and histories of Ritchie, Barbour, Harrison and Randolph Counties, West Virginia. So you can tell if someone is a product of incest if their skin is blue! By the time a young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in the 1960s to cure the blue people, Martin Fugates descendants had multiplied their recessive genes all over the Cumberland Plateau. But as Kentucky became more populated and more genes came into the Fugate family tree, there were far fewer children born blue. Got a question about todays news? Methemoglobinemia can also be caused by reactions to certain topical pain relievers like benzocaine and xylocaine. Scotts Alaskans seemed to match Caweins blue people. All lived in isolation from the world, bunched in log cabins up and down the hollows, and so it was only natural that a boy married the girl next door, even if she had the same last name. Since rail lines and paved roads didn't make it out to Troublesome Creek for nearly a century, the blue recessive gene was passed down to generations of Fugates and neighboring families, all of whom came to be known as "the blue people of Kentucky.". As it was, the Fugates stayed in the same area well into the 20th century. (Baltimore: Gateway Press 1986). Everyone around here knows about the blue Fugates, says Hilda Stacy who, at 26, looks more like a sister than a mother to her children. Come on, Grafton rednecks. Some of us finished high school and became the "dreaded wife and mother"-as society portrays it. Have you ever heard of the blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek? she asked the doctors. Exhibitions in the McGee Gallery bring ideas and objects together in new ways, highlighting the breadth and depth of the Art Museum's permanent collection: In/Humanity: Combat and War in Art, an . Correction, June 9, 2008: The article originally stated that a handful of states allow marriages between first cousins. type to search . For the Fugates, family members expressed the gene to varying degrees. Where people have deer horns on their hoods. In other words, to get the disorder, a person would have to inherit two genes for it, one from each parent. Because of the dispersion of fluids, the solution only lasts for about a day so the carrier would have to drink a serving every day. Google Maps. I can see that old blue running out of my skin, he confided. West By God is right. Add to calendar. Blue Man Group will rock your world. By 1850, approximately half of Kanawha County's slaves worked in the salt industrymany mined coal to fuel the furnaces. In the 1880s and 1890s, writers such as Mary Noailles Murfree and John Fox Jr. traveled across Appalachia, looking for local color, and overstated the degree to which mountain populations lived in isolation. Six generations after a French orphan named Martin Fugate settled on the banks of eastern Kentuckys Troublesome Creek with his redheaded American bride, his great-great-great great grandson was born in a modern hospital not far from where the creek still runs. 702 ft (214 m) Time zone: UTC-5 (Eastern (EST)) Summer : UTC-4 (EDT) GNIS ID: 1549599: Blue is an unincorporated community in Tyler County, West Virginia, United States. score: 5 of 27 (18%) required scores: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 list stats leaders vote Vote print comments. They were real, and they really were blue, thanks to a recessive genetic condition. If this story were true everyone in Alabama would be blue. He was born in the 1970s in a maternity ward of Hazard, Kentucky. What he got from Martin Fugate was dark blue skin. Blue skin. The gene would most likely appear in an inbred line. When Benjy was born with purple skin, his relatives told the perplexed doctors about his great grandmother Luna Fugate. From California herself, the informant was very curious to hear about what the people of West Virginia were like. March 8, 2012— -- Kerry Green was a "blue baby," born in 1964 in Tulsa, Okla., and his family was given little hope that he would live because of a malformed aorta. Its located along the Ohio way, way out on Route 250, so you know the locals here have lots of free reign to shoot stuff, blow things up and mud to their hearts content. References Ask the Explainer. Theres a debate as to what percentage of Hurricane is white. They just accepted it as a part of who they were. Benjy was born in a maternity ward near Hazard, Kentucky and was rushed by ambulance to a medical clinic in Lexington to find help for his blue problem. According to the official dictionary definition of a redneck, and based on stereotypes that the internet says are true, using science to determine the most redneck cities in a state cant be too far off. This condition does, in fact, cause blue-tinted. Cawein eventually found a small population of people in the back woods of Appalachia, many with a blue skin disorder. Regardless, this place might be the whitest, redneckest of them all. We see fit that they will grow up to be strong holler girls or boys. Well, as you can imagine, I really examined them. Population: 7,164Mobile home parks per capita: 2nd in West VirginiaBars per capita: 2nd in the stateWalmart rank: 3rd. H & S Sporting Goods, Princeton, WV. Appearance: Blue grosbeaks are medium birds about 8 long, large, bright blue, with large silver bills, and chestnut wingbars. No mention of his skin color is made in the early histories of the area, but family lore has it that Martin himself was blue. Diet: Insects, seeds, and grains. The boy inherited his fathers lankiness and his mothers slightly nasal way of speaking. In the 1950s more than a fifth of the working population worked in the coal . Archives of Internal Medicine, April, 1964.2. In 1820, Martin Fugate, who is believed to have been blue, moved to Troublesome Creek from France and just happened to shack up with Elizabeth Smith, who also carried the gene. Theyre prominently featured in reality television. Dating back to the early 1800s, an isolated family in eastern Kentucky - who can trace their roots back to a French orphan - started producing children who were blue. When West Virginia University decided to put "Black Lives Matter" decals on the back of their football helmets, the reaction by the people of . Her face and her fingernails were almost indigo blue. The people of West Virginia are deeply proud and they don't particularly like change of any kind. Dating back to the early 1800s, an isolated family in eastern Kentucky who can trace their roots back to a French orphan started producing children who were blue. Fugates married other Fugates. The lightness or darkness of the blue depends on the amount of the substance the person has circulating in them from birth. The man who discovered the cure for methemoglobinemia was Madison Cawein III, a hematologist (blood doctor) at the University of Kentucky who heard tales of the "blue people" and went looking for specimens in the 1960s. In normal people hemoglobin is converted to methemoglobin at a very slow rate. He was a French orphan who knew nothing of his lineage. Due to all this inbreeding, there were a lot of blue people running around the backwoods of Kentucky. I just knew that patient was going to die right there in the health department, but she wasnt atall alarmed. The bluest Fugates I ever saw was Luna and her kin, says Carrie Lee Kilburn, a nurse who works at the rural medical center called Homeplace Clinic. So close! He tested first for abnormal hemoglobin, but the results were negative. The following piece was collected at a dinner table with a group of girls out celebrating a friends birthday. West Virginia Get facts and photos about the 35th state. But his first love, which he developed as an Army medical technician in World War II, was hematology. This led to the propagation of the genetic condition that gave them their distinctive blue skin color. That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black. Im a hematologist, so something like that perks up my ears, Cawein says, sipping on whiskey sours and letting his mind slip back to the summer he spent tromping around the hills looking for blue people.. All he needed was a substance that could "donate" a free electron to the methemoglobin, allowing it to bond with oxygen. West Virginia: County: Tyler: Elevation. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. What Happened to the Blue People? Over time, fewer and fewer babies were born blue, and those who were took a methylene blue pill once a day to put the pink back in their cheeks. Researchers believe this to truly be the case, a result of the family suffering from a genetic condition called methemoglobinemia, which is an excess of methemoglobin in the red blood cells of the body. Methemoglobin which is blue, is a nonfunctional form of the red hemoglobin that carries oxygen. As coal mining and the railroads brought progress to Kentucky, the blue Fugates started moving out of their communities and marrying other people. What is a redneck anyways? However, now that the Fugate gene pool is more diverse, there is less need for this treatment, as fewer blue children are being born. The Fugates are of French Huguenot descent, with the original immigrant ancestor coming over from France in about 1820. Sit back, relax, and read the amazing but true genetic tale of the Blue People of Kentucky. It was caused, Scott speculated, by an absence of the enzyme diaphorase from their red blood cells. Cawein, Madison and E.J. At 55%, people may feel extremely lethargic and go in and out of consciousness. Ballengee testified in earlier civil depositions. The methylene blue he used on them is a dye a blue dye, ironically. He married a red-haired American named Elizabeth Smith who had a very pale complexion and their union formed a genetic mutation that resulted in their descendants being born with blue skin. There are still blue people around today, but some of them developed their blueness from ingesting colloidal silver. John Stacy still lives on Lick Branch of Ball Creek. As an Army medical technician in World War II, was discussing an upcoming trip to her... Back, relax, and website in this browser for the next time I comment is ``! Been sent to Panama, where his son was born bright blue, thanks to child. I just knew that patient was going to die right there in the of... 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Virginians and disruptive to their way of life fit that they will grow up to be a chocolate brown instead. Emigrated to Kentucky in 1820 to claim a land grant on the amount of the people... Topical pain relievers like benzocaine and xylocaine they have the 2nd most home! Orphaned as a negative to many West Virginians and disruptive to their way of life more. Of blood from the Ritchies and hurried back to martin and Elizabeth Fugates blue children in. Be a chocolate brown color instead of bright red in patients with methemoglobinemia, the blue people of west virginia... Madison Cawein, a descendant of martin Fugate was blue, is a product of incest if skin... Married her, and he did some of them developed their blueness from ingesting colloidal silver someone is a a. They don & # x27 ; s principal address is Tuckers Run.!, not get the disorder did n't seem to cause any Special health problems all inbreeding! Of them old people went by that name the blue Fugates started out! 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