The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

by Bill Bryson

No one ever found this mysterious community. But in a remote and neglected corner of the Appalachians, high up in the Clinch Mountains above the town of Sneedville in northeastern Tennessee, there still live some curious people called Melungeons who have been there for as long as anyone can remember. The Melungeons (no one knows where the name comes from) have most of the characteristics of Europeans—blue eyes, fair hair, lanky build—but a dark, almost Negroid skin coloring that is distinctly non-European. They have English family names—Brogan, Collins, Mullins—but no one, including the Melungeons themselves, has any idea of where they come from or what their early history might have been. They are as much of a mystery as the lost settlers of Roanoke Island. Indeed, it has been suggested that they may be the lost settlers of Roanoke.