The Spanish in 16th century Appalachia
What is the origin of the original 16th century Melungeons of Appalachia?
It is believed that that the original Melungeons began with the Spanish soldiers, settlers and miners who were living in established forts and towns scattered throughout the Appalachian wilderness. At that time, the capital of Spanish Florida was at Santa Elena on the coast of present-day South Carolina. When the Spanish abruptly moved the capital to Saint Augustine in Florida, these forts and settlements and their inhabitants were abandoned. These abandoned Spanish, most of whom were believed to be Conversos and Crypto-Jews, were 300 miles into the interior of what is now Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Photo credit: Rendering by Richard Thornton, https://apalacheresearch.com/2024/03/19/santa-elena-the-first-capital-of-la-florida/
Although traditional histories state that the Native Americans killed all of these abandoned Spanish soldiers, this apparently was not the case, as their descendants were the people who the English and Scots-Irish later encountered as they moved to the Appalachian frontier. The Uchees (Yuchis) and other tribes in these areas had turned their own towns into towns of refuge and took in the Spanish, and the few African slaves with them, who then married Native women.
An Uchee town in the Georgia Mountains
Photo credit: Rendering by Richard Thornton https://apalacheresearch.com/2019/07/23/the-uchee-yuchi-everything-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask/comment-page-1/
These early Melungeons of mixed Spanish/Portuguese, Native American and African descent declared themselves to be Portuguese, possibly for two reasons:
- Many Portuguese men did sign on as crew on Spanish expeditions
- As Jane Gerber states in her book The Jews of Spain, during the Spanish Inquisition the Conversos in major Spanish cities referred to themselves as “Portuguese” because of fear of the Inquisition.
Researchers cannot definitively prove that the Spaniards in Appalachia were Conversos or Crypto-Jews, but there is evidence that points in that direction.
In a webinar sponsored by the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, Rabbi Merrill Shapiro spoke about the Sephardic Jewish colonizers of St. Augustine and the later Sephardic explorers in the Appalachian area.
According to Rabbi Shapiro, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, who founded St. Augustine and became governor of La Florida, took on a “cargo” of between 150 and 300 people in secret, in the dead of night, before departing from Spain in 1565. It is believed that these passengers were Jews seeking to flee the violence of the Inquisition. (In The Jews of Spain, Gerber notes that many Conversos signed on as ships captains or crew, and it was generally acknowledged that the Jewish captains knew where illegal passengers could be landed in America.)
Pedro Menendez de Aviles
Photo credit: Wikipedia
When Menendez’s fleet reached Florida, although land was sighted and some crew disembarked and prepared advance fortifications, no one else got off the ship for another ten days, at which time the land was claimed for Spain.
Rabbi Shapiro maintains that there is only one explanation for this delay, and that is, that the date on which land was first sighted was the first day of Rosh Hashanah (according to the Julian calendar then in use), and the date on which the land was formally claimed was the day after Yom Kippur. The admiral waited until after the Jewish High Holidays, maybe because he himself was Jewish, but certainly because so many passengers were.
It was this same Admiral Menendez who the following year sent Captain Juan Pardo (who many scholars believe to have been a Converso) with a large contingent of soldiers and settlers (also possible Conversos) to the town of Santa Elena on the coast of present-day South Carolina. Menedez had earlier established the town to be the capital of La Florida to prevent the French from expanding into the area.
Santa Elena, located on Parris Island, SC
Photo credit: sciencedirect.com
Pardo was then dispatched on an expedition through the Appalachian Mountains.
Captain Juan Pardo
Photo credit: https://confederacinhispanica.wordpress.com/2018/09/29/el-capitan-juan-pardo-y-sus-exploraciones-en-las-carolinas/
According to some accounts, his goal was to open the eastern end of a road that would eventually connect Santa Elena with Pensacola, Florida. Pardo and his men traveled through the interior of present-day North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama, building as many as six forts and establishing settlement towns.
Some of these locations were in the areas of Georgia and North Carolina known to have deposits of gold and gemstones, and the Spanish conducted mining activities and set up smelters. Several researchers maintain that the actual mining activities were conducted by Sephardic Jewish miners from the Asturias region of Spain.
The men who remained at these locations had to swear that they would not depart from the forts without orders from Spanish authorities. Those orders never came, and when Santa Elena was abandoned in 1587, those Spanish soldiers/settlers/miners also were abandoned.
It is telling that the Spanish forts, towns, and mining operations were located in areas where Melungeons were later found to be living and where many of their descendants continue to live today.
My father’s family lived for generations in one of those areas of North Carolina, and my mother’s family has lived for generations in one of those areas in North Georgia.
One of the forts and towns built by Juan Pardo’s men was located less than 10 miles from my house, and evidence of Spanish mining activities, including Spanish artifacts, have been discovered in the Nacoochee Valley area of Northeast Georgia, only two miles from where I live.
Other Sephardic groups in Appalachia
Other groups believed to be Sephardic Jews also made their way to the frontier areas of Appalachia and blended in with the Spanish to become the early Melungeons. These groups had fled Spain and moved into southern France and the Netherlands before immigrating to England and then to America.
Many of the Huguenot (French Protestant) families from the south of France and the so-called “Black Dutch” from the Netherlands may have been Sephardic Jews. (Based on stories passed down in my family, this appears to have been the case for some of my ancestors.)
Many Scottish immigrants, too, may have had Sephardic Jewish ancestry, according to some researchers. In many cases, the Scots, French and Dutch immigrated through Virginia and Maryland and then formed family/kinship groups (as did my family) and migrated to western North Carolina, western Virginia, western South Carolina, and Tennessee. After the American Revolution, many moved into the still-frontier area of northern Georgia.
By the mid-1700s, although there were phonetic variations in the spelling of surnames among Melungeons, the surnames themselves remained relatively stable. Those surnames largely were English or Scots-Irish or had been Anglicized. The Judaic, Spanish heritage was perpetuated through given names such as names from the Hebrew Scriptures or actual Spanish given names or place names.
Several Sephardic customs remain in Appalachia to this day (customs which I always thought were Scots-Irish and still have difficulty believing that they may not be). These include: covering mirrors when someone dies; carefully checking eggs and throwing out any eggs with blood spots; taking care to drain all of the blood from slaughtered farm animals; and sweeping the floor from the corners of the room to the center, then gathering up the dust/debris so as not to sweep it past the mezuzah (even though Appalachian families, as a rule, don’t have a mezuzah on the doorpost).
Apart from the naming patterns and the above mentioned customs, Spanish Sephardic heritage was completely forgotten in most Melungeon families, was known but hidden in some families, and was remembered and passed down in other families.
The Appalachian Jew 