11. They are known for being carriers of a genetic trait that led to the blood disorder methemoglobinemia, causing the skin to appear blue. Eventually, Cawein gained their trust and began taking blood samples. Blue Grass Riding Club Of West Virginia, Inc. is a West Virginia Domestic Profit Corporation filed on January 19, 1965. Neighboring Virginia has more than 200 per square mile. Our skimmable newsletter is delivered to your inbox each week, giving you 5 things you need to read and get smarter. 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. She told me that her family was the blue Combses who lived up on Ball Creek. What Happened to the Blue People? The story of an Appalachian malady, an inquisitive doctor, and a paradoxical cure. The strain of inherited blue began to disappear as the recessive gene spread to families where it was unlikely to be paired with a similar gene. Different spellings of the surname sometimes include "Fugett" and "Fugitt". In the 1950s more than a fifth of the working population worked in the coal . Apparently, it shows more easily when theyre cold!. score: 5 of 27 (18%) required scores: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 list stats leaders vote Vote print comments. The antidote worked quickly but patients were required to take daily doses as it passed quickly through the urine. At West Virginia University in Morgantown, it . The condition is called methemoglobinemia, which is a disorder that reduces the amount of oxygen in the blood and body tissues . 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. 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. Days of testing provided no answers; but then Benjy's grandmother told the doctor a story about the "blue" Fugates. Methemoglobinemia is one of the rare genetic conditions that's treatable with a simple pill. The only thing Stacy cant or wont remember is that his wife Luna was blue. Dunlaps Gun & Pawn, Hurricane, WV. He injected the Ritchie siblings with 100 milligrams of the blue dye and didn't have to wait long to see results. Start your free trial today to learn more about your ancestors using our powerful and intuitive search. Its common. Scott, E.M. The relation of diaphorase of human erythrocytes to inheritance of methemolglobinemia, Journal of Clinical Investigation, 39, 1960.3. Levy married a Ritchie girl and bought 200 acres of rolling land along Ball Creek. 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. See the answer. 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.. Population: 7,164Mobile home parks per capita: 2nd in West VirginiaBars per capita: 2nd in the stateWalmart rank: 3rd. The Blue Ridge Mountains In West Virginia Were Named One Of The 50 Most Beautiful Places In The World. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. Luna is buried at the top of the hollow. West Virginians became the prototypical hillbillies, and incest served as a crude scientific explanation for their downtrodden social condition. 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. The Fugate family of Kentucky has been known for their blue skin color for generations. Bessie had an iron pot of clothes boiling in her front yard, but she graciously allowed the doctor to draw some of her blood. There are very few drives in West Virginia that . Such people tend to be very blue only at birth, probably because newborns normally have smaller amounts of diaphorase. 1 talking about this. Come on, Grafton rednecks. Google Maps. src: url('//www.incandina.pe/wp-content/uploads/fonts/41/MontserratExtraLight/montserrat-extralight-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'), Blood is also likely to be a chocolate brown color instead of bright red in patients with methemoglobinemia. Stacy courted her, married her, and moved over from Troublesome Creek to make a living in timber on her daddys land. He tested first for abnormal hemoglobin, but the results were negative. 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. If the blue people did have methemoglobinemia, the next step was to find out the cause. When they settled this country back then, there was no roads. Cause, you know, rednecks like to hunt, drink, smoke and shoot things. I couldnt tell you what caused it.. Cancel any time, no strings attached. Population: 7,164Mobile home parks per capita: 2nd in West VirginiaBars per capita: 2nd in the stateWalmart rank: 3rd. She has lived in the primitive dwelling without running water or electricity on the slopes of Dead Fall Mountain her entire life. 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. As it was, the Fugates stayed in the same area well into the 20th century. Theres a debate as to what percentage of Hurricane is white. [6] In his research, he found a 1960 article by E. M. Scott that was reported in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Steelworkers Damion Elkins, 50, right, and Edward Clonch, 43, left, in Huntington West Virginia. 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. The trait is recessive and when homozygous gives affected individuals, a distinctly blue color to their skin and chronic weakness. }catch(d){console.log("Failure at Presize of Slider:"+d)} West Virginia is one of the nation's most rural states, with 77 people per square mile. You know theres lots of rednecks here when you look at the numbers. Hilda Stacy (nee Godsey) is fiercely protective of her son. 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. Lappat, Hereditary Methemoglobinemia in Hemoglobin, Its Precursors and Metabolites, ed. Cawein cheers their bad luck not out of malice but out of a deep respect for the blue people of Troublesome Creek. Google Maps. Population: 5,258Walmart rank: 1stChew factor: 1stAmmo per capita: 9th. If enough blood is "infected" with this faulty type of hemoglobin, it changes from red to an almost purple-ish dark blue. Its blue, and their people have always had blue skin because of all the intermarrying and incest. This information supplied by John Graves whose uncle was the father of the child. Blood cells always looked so beautiful to me, he says. I looked at other enzymes and nothing was wrong with them. Why can colloidal silver turn your skin blue? And a Walmart all to their own. Informant: So, what my brother told me is that theres a story that there are people in the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, near the campus I guess, and there is skin is blue. If you stayed awake in high-school biology, you might remember that blood is red because red blood cells are packed with proteins called hemoglobin. Luna is buried at the top of the hollow. General Blog . Sweet Dreams. This province consists of northern and southern physiographic regions, which . In 2019, the novel The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson, described a fictional version of the Fugate family during the Great Depression. God Bless America. Many wonder why eggs are so diverse. So I knew we had the defect defined.. The Blue Ridge was reached in 1670, and in 1671 another expedition encountered the first westward-flowing stream, the New River, in southwestern Virginia. In the Inuit communities, scientists had pinpointed the problem, a deficiency of an enzyme that converted methemoglobin to hemoglobin. Methemoglobinemia can also be caused by reactions to certain topical pain relievers like benzocaine and xylocaine. 1:52. Trump's leading MAGA-loving insurrectionist Steve Bannon got himself so worked up this week he dropped an f-bomb. H & S Sporting Goods, Princeton, WV. But his first love, which he developed as an Army medical technician in World War II, was hematology. 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. Eventually, Cawein gained their trust and began taking blood samples. Tests for abnormal hemoglobin were negative. Theyre known simply as the blue people in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. '"He was almost purple,"' his father, Alva Stacy, recalls." Well, as you can imagine, I really examined them. 20 Fine Arts Drive, Morgantown, WV 26506. https://artmuseum.wvu.edu. 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. In 2020, U.S. News and World Report released a list of the 50 Most Beautiful Places in the World, and they acknowledged what everyone in West Virginia already knows . Embarrassed by their bluish hue, the families retreated even further from society, which only exacerbated the problem. Some say 99%. West Virginia had just one carrier in its exchange in 2015 - Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield - although the carrier only offered 12 plans in 2014, and bumped that up to 14 in 2015. 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. 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. The blood disorder is inherited as a simple recessive trait - meaning that to get the disorder, a person would have to inherit two genes, one from each parent. 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. Theres lots of trucks in Grafton, WV. [9], Benjamin Stacy, born in 1975, was the last known descendant of the Fugates to have been born exhibiting the characteristic blue color of the disorder, though he quickly lost his blue skin tone, exhibiting only blue tinges on his lips and fingertips when he became cold or agitated.[5]. This condition does, in fact, cause blue-tinted. However, the disorder didn't seem to cause any special health problems. 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