Book Review—The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Richardson
I have been reading this fiction book, but the story is based on real people that did exist and real events in our US history. Eleanor Roosevelt helped start a program within the WPA. Pack horse book Librarians road a route and loaned books to people in secluded areas of kentucky. Most of the librarians were women and they earned $28.00 a month.
The Pack Horse Library Project was headed by Ellen Woodward at a federal level. The project ran between 1935 and 1943. “Book women" were hired by the WPA and worked for around $28 a month delivering books in the Appalachians via horseback or on mules. They delivered both to individual homes and to schoolhouses. The WPA paid for the salaries of the supervisors and book carriers; all books were donated to the program.
The other unusual fact about the book was it’s main character was a “blue” woman. I had never heard of blue people except on my old Sister’s Blog. (Sister passed in November of 2014.) These blue skinned people were descendants of Martin Fugate of France. The blue gene was recessive and if two carried the gene, their children could be born blue.
About blue people from Wikipedia
Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith who had married and settled near Hazard, Kentucky around 1800, were both carriers of the recessive methemoglobinemia (met-H) gene, as was a nearby clan with whom the Fugates descendants intermarried. As a result, many descendants of the Fugates were born with met-H.
Descendants with the disease gene continued to live in the areas around Troublesome Creek and Ball Creek into the 20th century, eventually coming to the attention of the nurse Ruth Pendergrass and the hematologist Madison Cawein III, who made a detailed study of their condition and ancestry.
Cawein treated the family with methylene blue, which eased their symptoms and reduced the blue coloring of their skin. He eventually published his research in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1964.
As travel became easier in the 20th century, and families spread out over wider areas, the prevalence of the recessive gene in the local population reduced, and with it the probability of inheriting the disease.
Benjamin Stacy, born in 1975, is the last known descendant of the Fugates to have been born exhibiting the characteristic blue color of the disease and lost his blue skin tone as he grew older.
It has been speculated that some other American sufferers of inherited methemoglobinemia may also have had Fugate ancestors, but searches for direct links have so far proved inconclusive.
