The enzyme eventually builds to normal levels in most children and to almost normal levels in those like Benjy, who carry one gene. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. The expedition descended that river to Peter's Falls on the future Virginia-West Virginia border and claimed for England all the land drained by the New River and its tributaries. 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. Theyre normal people theyre good people. For more than a century, these Appalachian families passed along an exceedingly rare genetic blood condition that turned their skin a disarming shade of blue. In other words, to get the disorder, a person would have to inherit two genes for it, one from each parent. Zach took the doctor even farther up Copperhead Hollow to see his Aunt Bessie Fugate, who was blue. It can make a claim that it should top this list, since it has the most people. In his research, he found a 1960 article by E. M. Scott that was reported in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. 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. The Informant learned this information from her brother, when he returned home after his first semester at school. by Cathy TrostScience82, November, 1982. The solution, oddly enough, was a commonly used dye called methylene blue. As travel became easier, more people moved into and out of the Fugates area of Kentucky, including some actual Fugates. Wheeling's city flag checks all the boxes for an [] It seems as if this area is generally, more wealthy than the other cities on this list. This genetic defect comes from a rare recessive gene, so most people arent affected by it unless they happen to reproduce with another person who carries it. Cawein is no stranger to eccentricities of the body. Patrick and Rachel Ritchie, who lived in Hardburly, were also blue. She was as blue a woman as I ever saw.. Sometimes they married first cousins. Additional comment actions. 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. The clan kept multiplying. The Fugate family of Kentucky once lived in the isolated community of Troublesome Creek. While the substance isn't harmful, large amounts of it will tint any tissue that has blood flowing to it a blue color. 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.. They werent sick; it was just the way they look. There are even video games about rednecks. He recounted how, after hearing the story for the first time, he and his roommates would make a show of continuously checking to see if their other friends lips or skin ever looked blue. Population: 5,626High school graduation rate: 72%Gun stores per capita: 5th in WVFishing/bait per capita: 3rd in the state. "But if you're marrying your cousin, it's one in eight. his wife happened to be a carrier for the gene, so in turn about half of their children were blue. Its a part of our culture. Sometimes, it can be really faint though, so you have to look closely at their lips or fingernails. Those who are otherwise healthy with levels under 15% may exhibit minor symptoms or none at all. Between 1880 and 1920, southern West Virginia's population grew from 93,000 to 446,000, due almost entirely to the coal industry. Elkins Journeez Bar, Elkins, WV. This information supplied by John Graves whose uncle was the father of the child. Generations later, a descendant of Martin Fugate, Benjy Stacy, would be born "blue". As a result of a coincidental meeting of recessive genes, intermarriage and inbreeding, members of the Fugate family were born with a rare condition that made them visibly discoloured. al. They were delighted.". Fear that more inflation will cost jobs. Cancel any time, no strings attached. She told me that her family was the blue Combses who lived up on Ball Creek. This article is an opinion based on facts and is meant as info-tainment. Benjy Stacy is one of the last of the blue Fugates. The search for blue people ensued. Archives of Internal Medicine, April, 1964.2. They were like any other 1800s family except theyliked inbreeding. In online research, there was no mention made of "blue" people as recorded in the genealogy book, The Fugate Family of Russell County Virginia, published in 1986, but it has been confirmed in the Fugate discussions on the Genforum. When he was born with dark purple skin but healthy vital signs, his grandmother revealed the origins of their genetics. Apparently, it shows more easily when theyre cold!. That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black. 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. The state capital is Charleston. Population: 10,486Mobile home parks in area: 3rd in WVBars per capita: 3rdGun stores per capita: 5th in West Virginia. They were delighted., They changed colors! remembered Pendergrass. And by God, they didnt have the enzyme diaphorase. They were bluern hell, Cawein says. 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. Appearance: Blue grosbeaks are medium birds about 8 long, large, bright blue, with large silver bills, and chestnut wingbars. Have you ever heard of the blue people of Kentucky? Our skimmable newsletter is delivered to your inbox each week, giving you 5 things you need to read and get smarter. Is there anything really wrong with being called a West Virginia redneck? 2017-2018 Blue Book Frontice (p. I-VIII) Section 1: Executive (p. 1-330) Section 2: Legislative (p. 331-508) Book is out of print, borrowed from Special Collections at the St. Louis County Library, St. Louis, MO. What is a redneck anyways? The region's first coal miners primarily were African Americans, both enslaved and free. Scott's research had found hereditary methemoglobinemia among Alaskan Eskimos and Indians caused by an absence of the enzyme diaphorase from their red blood cells. Since there werent any roads or trains near their small community, the kidswere married off to the only people who lived nearby: their cousins. The boy inherited his fathers lankiness and his mothers slightly nasal way of speaking. 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. Luna Stacy possessed the good health common to the blue people, bearing at least 13 children before she died at 84. Fortunately, Cawein was able to find an antidote for the blood disorder - methylene blue which acted as an electron donor. The Fugate family intermarried with a neighbouring family for generations, which led to a relatively pure gene pool, often including the met-H gene. 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. It's true that, through the 19 th century, transportation networks developed slowly in the rugged, westernmost portion of Virginia (incorporated as West Virginia in 1863). They were really embarrassed about being blue, he said. One could inherit the gene, not get the blood disorder, but pass the gene on to a child. Blah. 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. The gene is still around today but has now become statistically insignificant and there are no serious medical problems associated with it. Faris, David. Its nothing.. It is documented that Fugates were born in the colonies in the mid 1600's but the original progenitor has not been confirmed. Rachel was leaning against the wall. We used science and data to determine which cities in WV are redneck heaven. He left the Fugates with a supply of the methylene blue in pill form, as it must be taken regularly to keep the skin a normal color, by continually eliminating the mis-colored hemoglobin. 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. However, the disorder didn't seem to cause any special health problems. 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. Cawein eventually found a small population of people in the back woods of Appalachia, many with a blue skin disorder. And shop at Walmart. Population: 18,763Bars per capita: 6th in West VirginiaFishing/bait shops per capita: 4thMobile home parks per capita: 5th. Blood is also likely to be a chocolate brown color instead of bright red in patients with methemoglobinemia. Rednecks are hailed as being great in our song lyrics. score: 5 of 27 (18%) required scores: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 list stats leaders vote Vote print comments. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Hearing this story and conducting some research of my own led me to believe that people love to come up with their explanation for things they cannot explain, no matter how perplex. Upon further research, I saw that the original story was based on a specific family that was said to be suffering from blue-tinted skin. Little Blue Run in Chester West Virginia is gone 8/8/2004: The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review writes about Little Blue Run: Dangerous disposal, by Alyson Walls . He hasnt studied the condition for years. Blue human aren't possible. Different spellings of the surname sometimes include "Fugett" and "Fugitt". However, now that the Fugate gene pool is more diverse, there is less need for this treatment, as fewer blue children are being born. 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. So you know theres some good fishin there. 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. The 76-year-old diva used the less than divine choice of words for the Mountain State in a Twitter against Sen. Joe Manchin torpedoing President Biden's multitrillion-dollar spending plans. He helped isolate an antidote for cholera, and he did some of the early work on L-dopa, the drug for Parkinsons disease. West Virginia's population has grown very slowly since the 1950s, at many times losing people . 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. "She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!" recalls Pendergrass, who is now 69 and retired from nursing. And a Walmart all to their own. Folklore maintained the Fugates were blue due to heart disease or lung problems. 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 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. Scott, E.M. The relation of diaphorase of human erythrocytes to inheritance of methemolglobinemia, Journal of Clinical Investigation, 39, 1960.3. The good news for those who may still be born expressing the blue gene is that there is a treatment. Embarrassed by their bluish hue, the families retreated even further from society, which only exacerbated the problem. 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 Hereditary diaphorase deficiency and methemoglobinemia. The area was never entirely cut off, but many people lived in remote closed communities with little incoming or outgoing migration. Read on below to see where your town ranked. Have you ever heard the song, Blue Moon of Kentucky? Its pretty well-known and popular. Population: 5,191High school graduation rate: 70%Walmart rank: 4thDive bars and mobile home parks: 7th. 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. Meghan. My first reaction to this story was wondering whether there was a scientific reason, or condition perhaps, that acted as a precursor to this belief of a skin condition that was a result of incest. The only thing Stacy cant or wont remember is that his wife Luna was blue. valley in the mountains in West Virginia with a barn and cows visible West Virginia Mountains Fall Foliage The Mountain Spruce Fall Colors Beautiful Pictures He had to drive eight hours back to Hazard to search out the Ritchies, who lived in a tapped-out mining town called Hardburly. Wait. The ZTF scans the entire Northern sky . Settling in the remote hills of Kentucky, there werent a lot of other people nearby, and marrying people who were closely related became common among the Fugates. Then he began to construct the family genealogy and traced their roots back to Martin and Elizabeth Fugate. The Wilson Family of West Virginia. GreenPower Motor Co. to begin manufacturing at South Charleston, West Virginia facility 'this quarter' Hot and cold: Up and down weather calls for adaptation for West Virginia's ski destinations; Morgantown (West Virginia) business owner who pleaded guilty to Jan. 6 charges sued along with Trump; This Week in West Virginia History 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 . 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. 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.. Luke was just as blue as Lake Louise on a cool summer day, doctor Charles H. Behlen II told the Tri-City Herald in 1974. The gold of the helmet did not reflect the gold utilized in our colors today. We see fit that they will grow up to be strong holler girls or boys. Stacy counts Fugate blood in his own veins. 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. At last they were free of their "blue" shade and were no longer embarrassed. In the 1950s more than a fifth of the working population worked in the coal . Two days of tests produced no explanation for skin the color of a bruised plum. Some sites say 100%. Google Maps, KCR Barrel Saloon, Charles Town, WV. 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. In fact, change is seen as a negative to many West Virginians and disruptive to their way of life. Eventually, the recessive gene began to disappear once coal mining and the railroad opened the community to outsiders. Of their seven children, four were reported to be blue. 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. Martin married a red-headed American woman named Elizabeth Smith and the two set up a homestead on the banks of Troublesome Creek near Hazard County, Kentucky. If youre analyzing smaller cities in West Virginia with blue collar workers, where people have lots of options for drinking, smoking, hunting and Walmarting, this is an accurate list. As three bald and blue men explore our world, together we'll discover music, laughter and surprises at every turn. Dark blue lips and fingernails are the only traces of Martin Fugates legacy left in the boy; that, and the recessive gene that has shaded many of the Fugates and their kin blue for the past 162 years. astounding ignorance toward his own countrymen, [are neither] unique [n]or particularly common to the region. Even though Lynchburg is about 100 miles from the West Virginia border, Falwell said he would vote for the city to leave Virginia for the purpose of "escaping the barbaric, totalitarian and . Today I have a healthy son/nephew who is slightly green in skincolor. She lives alone in one of the. 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. Eventually, Cawein gained their trust and began taking blood samples. Studying the problem, Cawein figured out that he could convert methemoglobin to hemoglobin without the enzyme. Genetic Causes Cawein needed fresh blood to do an enzyme assay. It's also, in part, out of fear. Laughing, the Informant launched into a story of the "West Virginia Blue People", a story about a genetic condition the resulted from intermarriage. Ballengee testified in earlier civil depositions. When Benjy was born with purple skin, his relatives told the perplexed doctors about his great grandmother Luna Fugate. During the same time period, missionaries reported pervasive ignorance and poverty, with large families living together in ramshackle cabins. Blue Hole, West Virginia GPS Coordinates to Blue hole 39.594754,-79.748120 Patrick was all hunched down in the hall. The Derby Bar & Grill, Fairmount, WV. History Timeline of the Native Indians of West Virginia. They just accepted it as a part of who they were. Blue People of West Virginia | . A nearby family who the early Fugates married into quite extensively also carried the gene. Yes, West Virginia is among the poorest if not the poorest state in the union as well as one of the most uneducated and least economically developed. Google Maps. My grandmother Luna on my dads side was a blue Fugate. Art Museum of West Virginia University, McGee Gallery View map. Correction, June 9, 2008: The article originally stated that a handful of states allow marriages between first cousins. Cawein, Madison, et. By. Give the gift of knowledge with our official 'did you know' book. With Fugate blood on both his mothers and his fathers side, the boy could have received genes for the enzyme deficiency from either direction. Well, as you can imagine, I really examined them. 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. Martin Fugate arrived in the unsettled frontier of Kentucky in 1820. In the Inuit communities, scientists had pinpointed the problem, a deficiency of an enzyme that converted methemoglobin to hemoglobin. So I brought back the new blood and set up my enzyme assay, Cawein continued. Other people in the region knew the family well, and most were related to them, so seeing blue people and marrying them did not seem unusual to the locals. Theyre known simply as the blue people in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Learn how your comment data is processed. There are still blue people around today, but some of them developed their blueness from ingesting colloidal silver. So I knew we had the defect defined.. 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. 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. Eventually, a nurse named Ruth Pendergrass heard of them, and, along with a hematologist named Madison Cawein III, decided to go meet these locally famous blue people in person. I'm going to assume that by blu. A lot of nice farmland was lost to the lake over the . The Faces of Appalachia. Everyone knew the blue Fugates were healthy people. The mystery behind the astonishing picture of the Fugates, which has been baffling people for years, appears to have finally been solved. These people arent related to the Fugates: Also fake. He was a French orphan who knew nothing of his lineage. What he got from Martin Fugate was dark blue skin. The family was first discovered in 1958 when one of the blue men, Luke Combs, who was a descendant of another branch of the Fugate family, took his white wife to the University of Kentucky Hospital and doctors paid more attention to him than his wife. THE town of Odd, West Virginia is a quiet, rural countryside, despite all the buzz surrounding the infamous inbred family, The Whittakers, who live within it. Methemoglobinemia is a rare hereditary blood disorder that results from excess levels of methomoglobin (metHb) in the blood. 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 was caused, Scott speculated, by an absence of the enzyme diaphorase from their red blood cells. Martin and Elizabeth set up housekeeping on the banks of Troublesome and began a family. Cawein cheers their bad luck not out of malice but out of a deep respect for the blue people of Troublesome Creek. A new playing surface, FieldTurf Revolution 2.5, was installed in 2016, giving West Virginia one of the country's safest and most . Once he had the enzyme deficiency isolated, methylene blue sprang to Caweins mind as the perfectly obvious antidote. Called methaemoglobinaemia (commonly known as met-H), the condition reduces the individuals ability to carry oxygen in their blood. I can see that old blue running out of my skin, he confided. Methemoglobinemia is one of the rare genetic conditions that's treatable with a simple pill. It was almost purple, his father recalls. In more recent memory, the 2003 film Wrong Turn helped perpetuate the inbreeding stereotype. Google Maps. It can be brought on by several things: abnormal hemoglobin formation, an enzyme deficiency, and taking too much of certain drugs, including vitamin K, which is essential for blood clotting and is abundant in pork liver and vegetable oil. "They vary in color from white to black, often have blue eyes and straight hair, and they are generally industrious. 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.) Madison Cawein began hearing rumors about the blue people when he went to work at the University of Kentuckys Lexington medical clinic in 1960. ( Returnto the corrected sentence.). When they settled this country back then, there was no roads. (Baltimore: Gateway Press 1986). 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. Rattini is accused of distributing narcotic painkillers illegally to more than 200 pharmacies across West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee. The reasons for this almost have to do entirely with coal. 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. it is a blood disorder in which their blood does not oxygenate correctly. The Fugate family of Kentucky has been known for their blue skin color for generations. 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. For the first time in their lives, they were pink. His lips and fingernails still turn a shade of purple-blue when he gets cold or angry a quirk that so intrigued medical students after Benjy's birth that they would crowd around the baby and try to make him cry. 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. In ramshackle cabins it shows more easily when theyre cold! after that. Methaemoglobinaemia ( commonly known as met-H ), the recessive gene began to construct the family genealogy and traced roots. Up Copperhead Hollow to see his Aunt Bessie Fugate, who was blue 's but the original has. You know ' book google Maps, KCR Barrel Saloon, Charles town, WV work on L-dopa, drug... Their blue people of west virginia or outgoing migration blue sprang to Caweins mind as the people! Last they were pink antidote for cholera, and he did some of the Fugates which... 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