BBC News | Americas | Lost people of Appalachia

"Melungeons lived for generations in isolated ramshackle cabins

By BBC Correspondent Richard Lister in Appalachia

In the heart of Appalachia in the southern United States, an isolated, dark skinned people known as the Melungeons, are challenging the accepted version of modern America's earliest history.


Richard Lister on the trail of a lost people

For centuries, they remained almost invisible to the American mainstream. They live hidden away on inaccessible mountain ridges, and a racially segregated society wrote them off as a mixture of white, black and American Indian.

Now, evidence is emerging which suggests that the Melungeons may have been among America's very first settlers, arriving in Appalachia long before the Northern Europeans.
Off the beaten track

I went to Newman's ridge in Tennessee, on the trail of the Melungeons, but first I had to find the town of Sneedville."