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A blue state’s road to red
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| Contributor | IndyGeorgia |
| Last Edited | IndyGeorgia May 08, 2018 09:14pm |
| Category | Profile |
| News Date | Oct 26, 2013 12:00pm |
| Description | PINEVILLE, W.Va. — Those old enough to remember still tell visitors how this mountain town helped make history on April 26, 1960. That was the day 600 people showed up in front of the Wyoming County courthouse to hear a patrician senator with a Boston accent make his case to be their next president.
Above: Nearly all the storefronts in Welch, W.Va., are empty. The town is part of McDowell County, one of the poorest in the state and one of the most impoverished in the nation. (Photo by Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
The electricity that afternoon in Pineville foreshadowed bigger things to come for the struggling candidate. Two weeks later, John F. Kennedy won more than 60 percent of the vote in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary, a victory that helped move the country past the presumption that a Catholic could never be elected to the White House.
In late June of this year, another expression of Pineville’s values appeared on the terraced lawn of the old courthouse. There was no fanfare around the installation of the new stone monument, but like that Kennedy rally more than half a century ago, it was a way of saying how the town felt about where the nation is headed.
The stone is engraved with the Ten Commandments, and it instructs: “They are to be used as a historical reference and model to enrich the knowledge of our citizens to an early origin of law from past generations so that they will serve as a historical guide for future generations to come.” |
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