Will Allen Dromgoole

Her great-grandparents were Edward Dromgoole, an Irish minister from Sligo, Ireland, and his wife, Rebecca Walton.

[citation needed] Dromgoole wrote a series of articles on the Southeastern ethnic group known as the Melungeons, published in the Nashville Daily American (1890) and the Boston Arena (1891).

[1][2] This historically mixed-race group was then living mostly in northeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Kentucky.

Her derogatory comments about them, while based more on hearsay than fact, expressed the biases about mountain people typical of her society and the period in which she was writing.

Since the early 20th century, Melungeons have increasingly intermarried with European Americans and integrated into mainstream white society.

[2] An excerpt appears on a plaque on the Bellows Fall-Vilas Bridge between the two respective cities in Vermont and New Hampshire.