[3] Raleigh County is included in the Beckley, West Virginia, Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Conflicts with European settlers resulted in various displaced Indian tribes settling in West Virginia, where they were known at Mingo, meaning "remote affiliates of the Iroquois Confederacy".

Alfred Beckley (1802–88) said that he named the county for Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618), the "enterprising and far-seeing patron of the earliest attempts to colonize our old Mother State of Virginia".

Later that year, the counties were divided into civil townships, with the intention of encouraging local government.

This proved impractical in the heavily rural state, and in 1872 the townships were converted into magisterial districts.

At least one hundred and eighty miners died in what was the second-worst coal mining disaster in state history.

More recently, the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, which killed twenty-nine miners, occurred in Raleigh County.

Raleigh County miners were also killed by violent suppression of labor organizing, such as in the so-called Battle of Stanaford during the 1902-1903 New River coal strike in which an armed posse led by a US Marshall who shot up miners' houses while they and their families slept, killing at least six.

[10] The lead-up and aftermath were witnessed and widely recounted by Mother Jones,[11] and the massacre is considered a prelude to the West Virginia coal wars.

[12] The town of Sophia in Raleigh County was the home of Senator Robert C. Byrd.

[13] The terrain slopes to the north and west; its highest point is near its southmost corner, at 3,524 ft (1,074 m) ASL.

[24] Raleigh County voters have tended to vote Republican in recent decades.