June 4, 2026
Volume 56 - No. 23
by lyle e davis Blame it on a French orphan by the name of Martin Fugate. He claimed a land grant in 1820 and settled on the banks of eastern Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek. No mention of his skin color is made in the early histories of the area, but family lore has it that Martin himself was blue. The odds against it were incalculable, but Martin Fugate managed to find and marry a woman who carried the same recessive gene. His red-headed Ameri-
can wife, was the former Elizabeth Smith, whose skin, it is said “was as pale as the mountain laurel that blooms every spring around the creek hollows.” The Fugates had seven children, four of whom were reported to be blue in color. They were away in the remote section of Kentucky and folks just naturally tended to marry folks that lived closest to them. Never mind the fact that these newlyweds were, more often than not, kin to one another. Likely first cousins at least.
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Fugates would marry other Fugates . . . but sometimes they’d branch out and marry Combses, Smiths, Ritchies, and Stacys. They all lived in isolation from “the real world,” bunched up in log cabins up and down the hollows so it just seemed natural to marry your neighbor. As a result, the clan kept multiplying and intermarrying and interbreeding. “When they settled this country back then, there was no roads. It
was hard to get out, so they intermarried,” says Dennis Stacy, a 51year-old coal miner and amateur genealogist who has filled a looseleaf notebook with the laboriously traced blood lines of several local families. Stacy counts Fugate blood in his own veins. “If you’ll notice,” he observes, tracing lines on his family’s chart, which lists his mother’s and his father’s great grandfather as Henley Fugate, “I’m kin to myself.”
Blue People See Page 2