It has nothing to do with melanin, the amino acid that gives people darker skin tones. Embarrassed by their bluish hue, the families retreated even further from society, which only exacerbated the problem. She has lived in the primitive dwelling without running water or electricity on the slopes of Dead Fall Mountain her entire life. Curiosity drove him to Hazard where he was introduced to a nurse, Ruth Pendergrass, who had met a "dark blue" woman. Archives of Internal Medicine, April, 1964.2. Normally diaphorase converts methemoglobin back to hemoglobin. 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. Google Maps. The drugs effects are temporary, as methylene blue is normally excreted in the urine. The blue Fugates who did not wish to remain blue continued to take the pills, and contacted Dr. Cawein and other doctors to get more of them when needed. The region's first coal miners primarily were African Americans, both enslaved and free. One of the girls, the Informant, was discussing an upcoming trip to visit her brother at West Virginia University. When you click through real estate links on our site, we earn an affiliate commission. The mystery behind the astonishing picture of the Fugates, which has been baffling people for years, appears to have finally been solved. What neither she nor Martin could have known is that they both carried the recessive gene for a rare hereditary blood disorder called methemoglobinemia. They were delighted.". It run in that generation who lived up and down Ball [Creek]., They looked like anybody else, cept they had the blue color, Stacy says, sitting in a chair in his plaid flannel shirt and suspenders, next to a cardboard box where a small black piglet, kept as a pet, is squealing for his bottle. "For the first time in their lives, they were pink. Diet: Insects, seeds, and grains. The American Heart Association had a clinic in Hazard, and it was there that Cawein met a great big nurse who offered to help. Well, as you can imagine, I really examined them. Blue Man Group will rock your world. After ruling out heart and lung diseases, the doctor suspected methemoglobinemia, a rare hereditary blood disorder that results from excess levels of methemoglobin in the blood. History Timeline of the Native Indians of West Virginia. Excise tax on bottled soft drinks, syrups and dry mixtures; disposition thereof. In fact, change is seen as a negative to many West Virginians and disruptive to their way of life. The notion of widespread inbreeding was at least in part the result of crude assumptions about how these isolated forest people might have been perpetuating their communities. "She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!" recalls Pendergrass, who is now 69 and retired from nursing. All rights reserved. Then he began to construct the family genealogy and traced their roots back to Martin and Elizabeth Fugate. It wasn't always this way. Exaggeration-prone outsiders. 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. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. She was as blue a woman as I ever saw.. He married a red-haired American named Elizabeth Smith with a very pale complexion. In the early 1960's, this blue malady caught the attention of Madison Cawein, an inquisitive hematologist from the University of Kentucky. The range of blue that could express itself in the blue Fugates ranged from light blue to dark blue like a blueberry, with even darker blue on the lips and fingernail beds. 1:52. Luna is buried at the top of the hollow. There are still blue people around today, but some of them developed their blueness from ingesting colloidal silver. It was hard to get out, so they intermarried, says Dennis Stacy, a 51-year-old coal miner and amateur genealogist who has filled a loose-leaf notebook with the laboriously traced blood lines of several local families. Her face and her fingernails were almost indigo blue. This information supplied by John Graves whose uncle was the father of the child. Wait. Princeton is located down on I-77, before you make the climb into Virginia. Methemoglobinemia is one of the rare genetic conditions that's treatable with a simple pill. Google Maps. The people of West Virginia are deeply proud and they don't particularly like change of any kind. The West Virginia motto is Montani semper liberi, and the state is one of the most mountainous in the country; sometimes it is called the "little Switzerland" of America, and once I heard an irreverent local citizen call it the "Afghanistan of the United States."The precipitous upland nature of the terrain makes naturally for three things: (1) poor communications; (2) fierce sectionalism; (3 . When Benjamin "Benjy" Stacy was born in 1975, nurses and doctors were shocked and confused. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. 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. One day, one of the older mountain men cornered the doctor. They sing in the Stacy Family Gospel Band and have provided their children with a beautiful home and a menagerie of pets, including horses. The doctors finally came to the conclusion that Benjys color was due to blood inherited from generations back.. Fortunately, Cawein was able to find an antidote for the blood disorder - methylene blue which acted as an electron donor. References Laughing, the Informant launched into a story of the West Virginia Blue People, a story about a genetic condition the resulted from intermarriage. Have you ever heard of the blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek? she asked the doctors. 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. Most of the Fugates didnt seem to mind being blue. 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. "If you took any random person in the population, maybe one in 100,000 would carry this gene, if that many," says Ricki Lewis, a science writer and author of the textbook "Human Genetics: Concepts and Applications," now in its 13th edition. But by 3 years old and . Dr. Cawein injected the dye into the volunteers, and they were amazed to see how quickly their skin changed from blue to a healthy pink, then gradually to a Caucasian white. A fellow by the name of John E. Stacy spotted Luna at Sunday services of the Old Regular Baptist Church back before the century turned. Cawein and his colleagues published their research on hereditary diaphorase deficiency in the Archives of Internal Medicine (April, 1964) in 1964. They were like any other 1800s family except theyliked inbreeding. In normal people hemoglobin is converted to methemoglobin at a very slow rate. 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. Start your free trial today to learn more about your ancestors using our powerful and intuitive search. Legend has it that Martin himself may have had a blue tinge to his skin, but not the dark blue color of later Fugates. She shuns modern conveniences. I was actually born with my twin sisters fetus inside me. The first known ancestor was David Wilson, who was born in Scotland about 1650; he had a son David, born about . Lives in the south or midwest (or West Virginia), Walmarts, Golden Corrals, Bass Pro Shops, and Dollar Generals nearby. 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. In another neighborhood of this rust-belt city of 46,000, Pam and Ted Keesee have their own. Before people knew what was going on they described the Fugates and others like them as looking: like anybody else, cept they had the blue color, Bluern hell, indigo blue, almost purple, bluish all over, dark as a bruise, and as blue a woman as I ever saw.. valley in the mountains in West Virginia with a barn and cows visible Stephanie Pittman 561 followers More information Blue People of West Virginia | . Well, there are more intriguing blue things in Kentucky than just the moon. yes, saw that years ago, colloidal silver, damn asshole medias, just state facts, you can prove., thanks for this honest reply. He injected the Ritchie siblings with 100 milligrams of the blue dye and didn't have to wait long to see results. 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. Just like the Alaskans, their blood had accumulated so much of the blue molecule that it over- whelmed the red of normal hcmoglobin that shows through as pink in the skin of most Caucasians. I looked at other enzymes and nothing was wrong with them. 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 . Everyone knew the blue Fugates were healthy people. They werent sick; it was just the way they look. The condition that made the Fugates blue causes large amounts of methemoglobin (which is a blue type of hemoglobin) to circulate in the blood. The odds against it were incalculable, but Martin Fugate managed to find and marry a woman who carried the same recessive gene. By the end of this spectacular journey, you'll be saying "I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT JUST HAPPENED BUT I LOOOVED IT." Read more Blue Man Group 4,830 reviews In fact, the last known blue Fugate was born in 1975, and his skin color faded to normal as he grew up. Incredibly, Benjy had inherited a gene dating back over 162 years! West Virginians became the prototypical hillbillies, and incest served as a crude scientific explanation for their downtrodden social condition. Scott was a Public Health Service doctor at the Arctic Health Research Center in Anchorage who had discovered hereditary methemoglobinemia among Alaskan Eskimos and Indians. Films That People Feel Guilty for Not Seeing. Cawein drew lots of blood from the Ritchies and hurried back to his lab. June 18, 2015. 15,898 100 A Cinephile's Guide to Biographical Films. As coal mining and the railroads brought progress to Kentucky, the blue Fugates started moving out of their communities and marrying other people. In the Inuit communities, scientists had pinpointed the problem, a deficiency of an enzyme that converted methemoglobin to hemoglobin. '"He was almost purple,"' his father, Alva Stacy, recalls." 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. John Stacy still lives on Lick Branch of Ball Creek. Research on intrafamilial marriage in such enclaves is slim. The Fugate familys condition caused the blue members to be missing that enzyme; because their methemoglobin couldnt be converted, large amounts of it built up in the blue Fugates, even before birth, causing a very obvious blue tone to their skin. Elkins Journeez Bar, Elkins, WV. Its nothing.. It is bordered by Pennsylvania to the north, Maryland and Virginia to the east, Kentucky to the southwest, and Ohio to the northwest. Stacy courted her, married her, and moved over from Troublesome Creek to make a living in timber on her daddys land. The lightness or darkness of the blue depends on the amount of the substance the person has circulating in them from birth. One of them even married his own aunt, and most of them had a lot of children who also married their cousins. Not myth or legend; The Blue People of Kentucky were an isolated enclave of Appalachian people who lived with an embarrassing skin discoloration until a young hematologist took notice and found a solution. (Baltimore: Gateway Press 1986). As a result of a coincidental meeting of recessive genes . They have the 2nd most bars and the 2nd most trailer/mobile home parks per capita in the state. Stacys son has built a modern house next door, but the old logger wont hear of leaving the cabin he built with timber he personally cut and hewed for Luna and their 13 children. Theyre prominently featured in reality television. West Virginia's House congressional districts run from east to west, creating a three-way split that fractures pockets of blue support in the far northern and southwestern parts of the state . As three bald and blue men explore our world, together we'll discover music, laughter and surprises at every turn. Before Cawein ended his study of the blue people, he returned to the mountains to patch together the long and twisted journey of Martin Fugates recessive gene. 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. Benjy lost his blue tint within a few weeks, and now he is about as normal looking a seven-year-old boy as you could hope to find. The antidote worked quickly but patients were required to take daily doses as it passed quickly through the urine. They wouldnt come into the waiting room. Cut off from contact with the wider population, they married cousins, aunts and other closely related kin, which greatly increased the odds of inheriting the condition. The Blue Fugates have essentially now gone from reality to legend. Of their seven children, four were blue. Blow your mind. Most of them old people went by that name the blue Fugates. This small enclave was no longer isolated and they began to disperse and marry outside of their little clan diminishing the effect of the "blue" gene. 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. Due to all this inbreeding, there were a lot of blue people running around the backwoods of Kentucky. Doctors were so astonished by the color of Benjy Stacys skin that they raced him by ambulance from the maternity ward in the hospital near Hazard to a medical clinic in Lexington. H & S Sporting Goods, Princeton, WV. It reduced the brightness of the blue on their skin. Then, in 2004, Abercrombie & Fitch released a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the Appalachian state and the words Its all relative in West Virginia. In February, a casting director for the upcoming thriller Shelter put out a call for extras with unusual body shapes, [and] even physical abnormalities to depict West Virginia mountain people. 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