Mike,

Jim Wood, a newspaperman in Beckley, W.Va., wrote the county history a few
years ago.  He wrote:

"Lincoln did not receive a single vote in Raleigh County in the presidential
election of 1860.  Overwhelming favorite of the county electorate was John
Bell of the Constitutional Union Party, who got 230 votes.  Southern
Democrat John Breckenridge received 69 votes, with 14 going to Northern
Democrat Stephen A. Douglas.*  Virginia as a whole gave Lincoln 1402 votes,
Bell 20,997, Breckenridge 21,908, and Douglas 5,742. **

* His source: Elizabeth Cometh and Festus P. Summers, eds. "The Thirty-Fifth
State", McClain Pub. Co., Parsons, W.Va. 1966, p. 286.
**  His source: Ibid., p. 286
This quoted from:  Jim Wood, "Raleigh County, West Virginia," 1994, BJW
Printing & Office Supplies, Beckley, WV.

Me again:  Something must have changed not too many years later, as my
grandfather and his brothers (born in the 1890s in Raleigh Co.) were named
for James G. Blaine, Thurlow Weed and Abraham Lincoln!

Libbie Griffin

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