The Melungeon people have also been referred to as the lost people of the Appalachians

The Melungeon are a group of people who were descendants of Europeans, Native Americans, and sub-Saharan Africans. The Melungeons were said to have settled the Cumberland gap area of Appalachia and included parts of Eastern TN, Southwest VA, and eastern Ky.

The Melungeons were a diverse group of people and were said to keep to themselves. They lived off the land and raised their families to the best of their ability. However, many still need to figure out where they came from, even some states setting up DNA testing groups to see where they came from due to the different cultures and bloodlines.

It is said they were discovered in the Appalachian mountains in 1654 by English explorers and described as ¨dark-skinned, reddish-brown complexioned people supposed to be of Moorish descent who were neither Indian nor Negro, but had fine European features and claimed to be Portuguese¨.

It is believed that the Melungeons settled in the Appalachian mountains around 1567 or earlier. Dr. Kennedy, who has been studying the history of the Mulungeons, stated that they:

“a people who almost certainly intermarried with Powhatans, Pamunkeys, Creeks, Catawbas, Yuchis, and Cherokees ¨

In 1673, James Needham, an Englishman, and Gabriel Arthur, his indentured servant, came to the mountains with eight Indians to explore the Tennessee Valley. Needham described finding ¨hairy people¨, and ¨congregated together and talked¨ in a language they did not recognize as English or an Indian dialect.

Needham described them as “hairy, white people with long beards and whiskers and wears clothing.” Needham concluded that they were speaking a language of Latin origin, which would fit the original theory of being Portuguese, as they claimed.

Another theory is that in 1540 a Spanish explorer, Hernando De Soto. He came to the Americas looking for gold and land, and he came with his enslaved people, and it is said that some of them escaped when they were wandering the Appalachian mountains, and possibly these were the first Melungeons.

However, many Melungeons were already in North America before European and African settlers. Evidence also showed Spanish and Portuguese presence in the sixteenth-century Americas, as well as ethnic Jewish and Moorish people who had converted to Catholicism before or during the Spanish Inquisition.

Possibly the best way to describe the Melungeons is a loose collection of families of diverse ethnic origins that migrated from different areas, lived near each other, and intermarried, creating a diverse multi-racial group of people containing a mix of European, African, and even native american. As is America, a boiling pot for many.