THE BLUE PEOPLE OF TROUBLESOME CREEK
The story of an Appalachian malady, an inquisitive doctor, and a paradoxical cure.
by Cathy Trost
©Science 82, November, 1982
Six generations after a French orphan named Martin Fugate settled on the banks of eastern Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek with his redheaded American bride, his great-great-great great grandson was born in a modern hospital not far from where the creek still runs.
The boy inherited his father’s lankiness and his mother’s slightly nasal way of speaking.
What he got from Martin Fugate was dark blue skin. “It was almost purple,” his father recalls.
Doctors were so astonished by the color of Benjamin “Benjy” Stacy’s skin that they raced him by ambulance from the maternity ward in the hospital near Hazard to a medical clinic in Lexington. Two days of tests produced no explanation for skin the color of a bruised plum.
A transfusion was being prepared when Benjamin’s grandmother spoke up. “Have you ever heard of the blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek?” she asked the doctors.
“My grandmother Luna on my dad’s side was a blue Fugate. It was real bad in her,” Alva Stacy, the boy’s father, explained. “The doctors finally came to the conclusion that Benjamin’s color was due to blood inherited from generations back.”
MORE:
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyperry3/Blue_Fugates_Troublesome_Creek.html
So, THAT’s where bluegrass music came from.... the Fugates of Caintucky!!