Fannin County, Georgia

[longtimelurker]

Counties like Fannin and Winston (AL) were pro-Union, anti-Confederate, and have ALWAYS been strongly Republican since the Civil War.  Other counties like them would be Garrett (MD), Avery (NC), and Gillespie (TX).  Neighboring counties in Appalachia (and whatever you want to call that strip of counties between San Antonio and Austin in TX) were like them, only less so.  Eastern Tennessee, south-central Kentucky, and much of western North Carolina were often the most heavily Republican areas of the country from 1870 to 1970.  A lot of the voters in Garrett and the Texas counties were German, even Catholic (as opposed to their Scottish or Scotch-Irish Presbyterian and Baptist fellow rural white southerners), poor, and few slave-owners among them.  These counties were very rural, and the only thing they disliked more than the Federal government were their respective state governments.  They were not "typical southerners" by any means.  Notice 1948 and 1968, when southern segregationists ran as third party candidates, these counties stuck with the Republican candidate, except for Winston which went for their governor George Wallace (I guess they learned to like their state government by then).

[longtimelurker]

One might have expected Jones County, MS to mirror Winston County, AL, since both put up similar resistance to the Confederacy (from various things I've read*).  But, Jones was only ~10% less Democrat than surrounding MS counties from roughly 1890-1940.  Not surprisingly, the least solidly Democratic counties (in presidential elections, at least) in MS were the Appalachian counties in the northeastern corner of the state (and from the 20's onward, the Gulf Coast counties, which started to trend Republican like the AL coast and western FL panhandle).

Regarding LA, rural southern LA parishes would vote Republican in presidential elections from the late 19th century through the 1920's.  A professional demographer and historian would need to sort out how much of this was African-Americans who were able to vote (which dropped off precipitously after 1896 in LA due to racist laws designed to disenfranchise them), and Cajuns who voted Republican because of the same reasons that many Appalachians did: they were poor whites who felt ignored by their Democratic state government.  The most "Republican" of these parishes seems to have been Assumption, which voted R in 1900, 1924 and 1936.  I've googled it and its seems demographically similar (same percentage of African-Americans and Cajuns) to surrounding counties; I wonder if African-Americans were "permitted" to vote there in higher percentages than surrounding parishes in those days (and in those days, before 1940, they were overwhelmingly Republican).

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Winston
http://wcgs.ala.nu/factandfiction.htm

and lots more...   

[longtimelurker]

Not New England, but Schoharie County, NY, voted Democratic consistently, until 1916.  In 1896 it was the only county in NY that Bryan carried; several other times it was the only upstate NY county the Dems carried.  But from 1920 on, it's been as Republican as the rest of rural upstate NY.  It doesn't seem to have been a (unionized) mining county where the mines closed down after WWI (there are actually "ghost towns" in NY and NJ because of mines that closed long ago); the population continued to go up.  Waaaay back in the middle of the 19th century that area of NY usually voted D in Presidential elections, Schoharie seems to have just been the last one to switch over to R, and it took 30 years.