And a sense that President . The doctors finally came to the conclusion that Benjys color was due to blood inherited from generations back.. 15,898 100 A Cinephile's Guide to Biographical Films. She gets upset at all the talk of inbreeding among the Fugates. 3 of 10 isnt good enough; think of how high you wouldve finished on this list had more of you ditched class to head to the hills on Friday mornings like a lot of your friends. Laurel Wheeler and family, Buena Vista, Rockbridge County, Virginia. Which means lots of weekend warriors probably live here; its the families that have boats and who book nice family hunting trips. The Blue People of Kentucky were first diagnosed with methemoglobinemia in the 1960s by Dr. Madison Cawein, a noted hematologist. As a result, their blood is darker than the color typically found running through peoples veins. For the Fugates, family members expressed the gene to varying degrees. The company's filing status is listed as Revoked (Failure To File Annual Report) and its File Number is 45369. One of em I remember seeing him when I was just a boy Blue Anze, they called him. They were really embarrassed about being blue, he said. Cawein and his colleagues published their research on hereditary diaphorase deficiency in the Archives of Internal Medicine (April, 1964) in 1964. All rights reserved. As a result of a coincidental meeting of recessive genes . She lives alone in one of the. Cawein advised giving the child methylene blue and not worrying about it. With Fugate blood on both his mothers and his fathers side, the boy could have received genes for the enzyme deficiency from either direction. In another neighborhood of this rust-belt city of 46,000, Pam and Ted Keesee have their own. 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. Grafton has the highest percentage of its population that didnt finish high school. Hilda Stacy (nee Godsey) is fiercely protective of her son. H & S Sporting Goods, Princeton, WV. Fortunately, Cawein was able to find an antidote for the blood disorder - methylene blue which acted as an electron donor. Finding it ridiculous herself, the Informant told me that she still enjoys being a part of the joke. 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 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. Major Occupational Groups in West Virginia ( Note --clicking a link will scroll the page to the occupational group): 00-0000 All Occupations 11-0000 Management Occupations 13-0000 Business and Financial Operations Occupations 15-0000 Computer and Mathematical Occupations 17-0000 Architecture and Engineering Occupations Google Maps. They were poor people, concurs Nurse Pendergrass, but they were good.References1. In most people, there is an enzyme present called diaphorase that converts methemoglobin back into a usable form of hemoglobin. It reduced the brightness of the blue on their skin. Luna is buried at the top of the hollow. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Eventually, the recessive gene began to disappear once coal mining and the railroad opened the community to outsiders. He remembered that the Ritchie siblings "were really embarrassed about being blue." Methemoglobin levels over 50% may result in seizures, coma, and death. 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. He had to drive eight hours back to Hazard to search out the Ritchies, who lived in a tapped-out mining town called Hardburly. By Jamie Kiffel-Alcheh Fast Facts Nickname: The Mountain State Statehood: 1863; 35th state Population (as of July, 2016): 1,831,102. "She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!" recalls Pendergrass, who is now 69 and retired from nursing. The Faces of Appalachia. A lot of nice farmland was lost to the lake over the . Population: 6,427High school graduation rate: 70%Bars per capita: 1st in WVMobile home parks per capita: 1st. One of the girls, the Informant, was discussing an upcoming trip to visit her brother at West Virginia University. 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. The doctor gave each blue family a supply of methylene blue tablets to take as a daily pill. 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. Laughing, the Informant launched into a story of the West Virginia Blue People, a story about a genetic condition the resulted from intermarriage. West Virginians became the prototypical hillbillies, and incest served as a crude scientific explanation for their downtrodden social condition. Cause, you know, rednecks like to hunt, drink, smoke and shoot things. 1 talking about this. Cawein needed fresh blood to do an enzyme assay. Martin and Elizabeth had seven children, four of whom were blue; the recessive gene meant there was a 25 percent chance of each pregnancy resulting in a blue child. Little did they know that their union would create shades of blue people! It is bordered by Pennsylvania to the north, Maryland and Virginia to the east, Kentucky to the southwest, and Ohio to the northwest. Martin and Elizabeth had seven children, four being born blue; Zachariah, who was blue, married his mother's sister. 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. One of them even married his own aunt, and most of them had a lot of children who also married their cousins. valley in the mountains in West Virginia with a barn and cows visible Stephanie Pittman 561 followers More information Blue People of West Virginia | . Many is more accurate since the practice is legal, or legal under certain circumstances, in more than 20 states. Blah. Google Maps. 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. 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. So you can tell if someone is a product of incest if their skin is blue! Houses belonging to people that lived in the valley were mostly torn down. I just knew that patient was going to die right there in the health department, but she wasnt atall alarmed. there is no "blue-soloution" that turns them back to a "normal" color. 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. Learn how your comment data is processed. The small coal mining town in McDowell County received national attention. The entry was on the blue men, not of West Virginia, but of the Mountain State's neighbor, Kentucky, . 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. If youre curious enough, here are the least redneck places in West Virginia (if thats even possible): We aim to deliver infotainment about where you live that your real estate agent won't tell you. If the blue people did have methemoglobinemia, the next step was to find out the cause. There are other ways to get blue skin without inheriting it, though. Those who are otherwise healthy with levels under 15% may exhibit minor symptoms or none at all. So, youd think people who are rednecks would be proud to be called a redneck. The clinic doctors only saw her a few times in her life and never for anything serious. 2019 Foreign-Born Population 30.2k people As of 2020, 1.64% of West Virginia residents (29.6k people) were born outside of the United States, which is lower than the national average of 13.5%. The Fugate family of Kentucky once lived in the isolated community of Troublesome Creek. 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. 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. In fact, the last known blue Fugate was born in 1975, and his skin color faded to normal as he grew up. Cawein was determined to find a cause and possibly a solution to help this small group of isolated Appalachian people. 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 . Luna Stacy possessed the good health common to the blue people, bearing at least 13 children before she died at 84. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. Soon, the Fugates became known as the Blue Fugates of Kentucky. Cawein eventually found a small population of people in the back woods of Appalachia, many with a blue skin disorder. 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. 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