Vardy Community Museum

Vardy lies in Hancock County below Newman's Ridge, in the part of Tennessee most closely tied to the people called Melungeons. The word began as an outsider's insult, and the earliest record of it is in the minutes of a Baptist church in Scott County, Virginia, in 1813. Legends gave the people Portuguese, Turkish or lost-colony origins, and writers such as Will Allen Dromgoole helped spread them. The records point elsewhere. Edward Price concluded in 1950 that the families descended from free people of color who moved into Hancock County from the Virginia and North Carolina piedmont in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and later studies largely agree. A 2011 Y-DNA study found ancestry primarily European and African, with one Native American line.

Tennessee's 1834 constitutional convention took the vote from free people of color and barred them from public schools. In 1892 the Presbyterian Holston Presbytery decided to open a mission school here. Annie Miller and Maggie Axtell came as missionaries, and Batey and Cynthia Collins gave the land. The church was finished in 1899 and the school served children of the Melungeon communities, in a segregated system, until 1973. The Presbyterians sold it to the county in 1955. The three-story 1929 schoolhouse collapsed in 2003.

The church is now the museum, run by the Vardy Community Historical Society. Across from it stands the cabin of Mahala Mullins, moved there in 2000, a famous bootlegger whom revenue agents called "katchable but not fetchable".