Local lore in a western New York town says Abraham Lincoln spent a snowy night there in 1855. A magazine writer says the story is true but the year is wrong.
Historians in Cattaraugus County say Lincoln was traveling from New York to Springfield, Illinois, in the winter of 1855 when his train got stalled by heavy snow in Little Valley, a small town 50 miles south of Buffalo.
But Alan Manchester writes in Western New York Heritage magazine that Lincoln's weather-induced layover actually occurred in early 1860.
Manchester says Lincoln was aboard a train that got stuck in a snowstorm in Little Valley on the night of March 12, 1860. The tavern where Lincoln spent the night burned down in 1866, a year after he was assassinated.
