March 21, 2019 • 29 mins
Were it not for the coal mine, the town of Vulcan, West Virginia may well have never existed. As a rural and geographically isolated community, Vulcan relied on a single, small bridge for its connection to the larger world. When the bridge failed, the town repeatedly tried to get financial assistance from the local and state government -- with no success. In a state of increasing desperation, the Mayor of Vulcan wrote the Soviet Union for help... during the Cold War. Listen in to learn what happened next.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Hello, Hi, how are you? Thank you for tuning into
Ridiculous History. Several of us listening today will be familiar
with an area of the world known as Appalachia, the Appalachians,
Appalachian Mountains, right, I've got I've got some past there. Um.
And the thing that's interesting about it is, even if
(00:44):
you live in the US, odds are that you have
not been there because it's it's quite a rural area,
but it's where today's story takes place. My name is Ben,
my name is nel Ben. Have you did you know
that if if you hike certain parts of the Appalachian Trail,
you get little rings on your walking stick or there's
some kind of merit badge you're supposed to get where
(01:04):
you can show on equivocally that you have hiked the
entire Appalachian Trail. I have. I have exactly zero of those.
I also well have hiked parts of the trail. I
have not hiked the entire thing. It's a heck of
a commitment, but it's a noble thing to do, Almost
as noble as being the producer on shows like Ridiculous History,
(01:27):
which reminds me should shout out our super producer, Casey
peg group. So, no, you have never hiked the trail,
but you've been to the Appalachians. Yeah, I have, and
I've I've been on parts of the trail. That's where
I found out about the medallion system, where it's these
little kind of curved metal pieces that indicate which parts
of the trail you successfully completed. And if you're like
(01:49):
a real ball or a real Appalachian trailhead, you have
a stick that's just like you know, covered in these things,
right right, just lousy with them. Well, one of the
most interesting thing about exploring this area of the world
is that you'll run into places where time seems to
have slowed down or things go at their own relatively
(02:12):
isolated pace. And in today's episode, we're going to explore
a tiny community that is, in its own way, very isolated.
It's called Vulcan in the western edge of West Virginia.
That's about as west as it gets, my friend, right, Okay,
that's that's actually not entirely true, but it's as west
(02:32):
as it gets in West Virginia. Right, it's a Virginia wise,
this is the west ist. Vulcan. West Virginia is an
interesting case. It's located along the Tug Fork, which is uh,
you know, part of the Tug River, and this is
often called one of the us is most storied waterways.
(02:54):
Vulcan is named after you know, spoiler alert, the god
of fire and Roman athology, Vulcan, and this is something
we had talked about off air. Vulcan makes an appearance
in a fantastic novel and set of TV adaptations called
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. You saw that, right, I
did a season two out yet or it's about to
(03:18):
come out. Yeah, um, I'm I'm excited. That's one of
those shows where I don't know about everybody else, but
I made the decision a while back that if I
really enjoy a show, I want to wait until the
entire season is out before watching it because Netflix ruined me. Man.
I just I can't watch something and wait for a
week and hope it shows up next week. It just
(03:39):
it triggers all kinds of you know, abandonment issues and patients.
You know, I'll tell you, I actually kind of I
like it in a different way. I like being with
the band, but I also like the old school cliffhanger
having to wait a week mentality of traditional television release.
I'll do that with maybe Game of Thrones. Game of
Thrones did it with True Detective, you know, the ones
(03:59):
that are edge of your cedars. I halfway did it
with True Detective Season three. Watched the first four episodes
and I said, oh wait, then you took a couple
of weeks off and then you had some little binge
abole episodes for you. Yep. In the case of Vulcan,
West Virginia, we find a town that is very much
(04:21):
isolated by geography more so than say culture. Right, we
could we talk a little bit about where Vulcan is.
We said, it's it's in this very southwestern corner of
West Virginia. But what's it around, Well, it's I mean,
it's kind of its own, weird little island in some ways,
and that there's no connection to the surrounding um areas
(04:45):
except through a little footbridge at the Norfolk and Western
Railway runs through the middle of the town um and
that separates the two sides of the town um from
one being low caated on the river bank. And then
there are ones that are up more inland on a
(05:05):
hill um that is very near to a cemetery called
Vulcan Hill. Uh. And here's the thing. I mean, even
to get out of the city, out of this little hamlet,
you would have to sometimes cross underneath parked railway cars.
Um kids, school kids had to catch the bus on
(05:25):
the Kentucky side in order to get there. They had
to go to some pretty perilous ends to to catch
the bus. And some kids have even been injured. And
I believe there was a case of a child losing
a leg um in such a situation. Yeah, yeah, it's
absolutely true. So we're looking at mountains, rivers, terrain that
(05:47):
is very difficult to traverse, so much so that had
coal not been discovered in the general vicinity here, you
could make a fairly strong argument that no one would
be living there at all. You know, maybe maybe some
guy decades and decades ago would have hit a moonshine
still out there, but even that would be um pretty arduous.
(06:11):
It's still be a lot of work to get there. However,
when coal was discovered in this area the very beginning
of the twentieth century, a mining camp was constructed and
this would later grow into what we recognize as Vulcan
West Virginia. But but the the thing is when the
(06:33):
mining camp was first constructed, when coal was first discovered there,
the miners who lived in the area had to row
across the river every day just to go to work,
that's right. And it wasn't until that mining company created
this very narrow wooden footbridge, um that folks could actually
get in and out of town without having to get wet. Um.
(06:54):
So the thing I was talking about with the kids
and the railway cars, that was a little bit there. Yeah, yeah,
that was a little bit later. But it's an excellent
example of the importance of this bridge and the problems
with this bridge. Picture this, if we're going to do
a rod Sterling intro picture this town. There's one way in,
(07:17):
there's one way out, and that's when the bridge is working,
drives straight into the Vulcan zone. So so the I'm
freestyling here. So over the years, the people who lived
in this community, realizing the key nature of this bridge,
they took great care to maintain it. And when automobiles arrived,
(07:42):
when they became a thing in this part of the world,
the people of Vulcan took upon themselves to expand this
bridge so that they could drive these vehicles across However,
to your point, Knell, when we say expanding, we mean
that they just bear made it big enough for one
car to drive across. Yeah, and this was d I
(08:05):
y ingenuity at his finest, because they didn't have somebody
swooping in to help them with infrastructure. It was literally
an effort of the townspeople to solve a problem they
needed solved. And to cross that bridge, a swinging footbridge
on a car. Good lord, that sounds like the most
terrifying experience ever of all time. No, no, thank you,
sir or madam. The way that The New York Times
(08:26):
described this bridge in an article on December sixteenth, ninety
eight by an author named Gregory Jeans, was that there
was no more than a quote thumb length margin for
error on either side. Have you ever driven around in
the mountains snow? Yeah, with the crazy switchbacks and like
where you're right off the edge of the cliff, like
(08:49):
he were so close, especially when you can't see what's
in front of you and you were just trusting that
around that that turn, You're not just gonna plummet to
your death. Oh and you know what this makes me?
Remember in we did an epic road rally car trip. Casey,
you were there and know you were there, and I
was there as well as my good friends Scott Benjamin.
(09:09):
We had to drive through parts of West Virginia that
were exactly like the switchbacks and all. That's where that's
where my main memories of it come from. Is that
very sketchy leg of that trip. And Scott. I don't
know if you know this about Scott, folks, but he
is a bit of a speed demon. He's got a
lead foot. Yeah, he was not. He was taking those
(09:31):
curbs like Steve McQueen and leaving us kind of clutched,
at least being personally clutching my my pearls. That's that's
why I pressured him to switch switch to the wheel
and ride Shotgun for a while and let me drive.
But if you've if you've ever been not just in
the Appalachian area, but if you've ever been in a
(09:52):
mountainous area in general in the car, you know what
we're talking about. These very narrow roads and lanes that
hug the side of the incline with maybe maybe some
wooden railing, maybe nothing, uh, And it can be very
disconcerting if you're a person who doesn't drive there every
day because people who drive there every day this is
(10:12):
a normal experience to them, So they think that they'll
think that you are driving like um, you know, like
an like an elderly person, right whereas we'll think they're
driving like lunatics. This is one of those bridges, but
it's not just in the mountainous area. It's over water,
there's not much margin for error. And then throughout the
(10:35):
decades right there, they're taking care of this bridge. It's
an a key artery of the town. But as we know,
as recent history is shown, coal mining doesn't last forever.
Toward the nineteen sixties or so, the coal resources begin
to dry up and the town feels like it's entering
(10:57):
an economic decline. It feels like there's trouble. But they
still have the bridge, at least that is until July nineteen. Yeah,
that's when, you know, despite their best efforts to keep
it up. I mean, they're not professional bridge caretakers, and
you know, understandably they've got work to do down in
those other dangerous part of town being the mines um.
So the bridge collapses at crumbles and it leaves them
(11:21):
pretty much for all intended purposes in an automobile based
society at this point, cut off from the outside world. Yeah,
and in desperate need of some assistance. So even though
things had never been particularly opulent in the town of Vulcan,
West Virginia, now things seemed increasingly desperate. One person in
the town described it as living at the tail end
(11:44):
of nothing. They knew that this situation was unsustainable. The
town depended upon this bridge. Around the time of the
bridge collapse, a woman named Nelly Holly had ordered a
living room sweep from up state further up in West Virginia,
and the truck arrived with the furniture, but the driver
(12:08):
refused to bring the goods to the Holly household because
the driver learned that the only road in the Vulcan
was this How does it described a ribbon of gravel
and it wasn't even public property right now, it belonged
to the railway. Says it was more of it more
or less an access road, Uh, not intended for this
kind of use, and kind of in a similar situation
(12:31):
we were talking about, and that it was very narrow,
very dangerous, and you'd be putting yourself at risk, and
especially since it it would technically be trespassing on private property.
And so now we introduce you to a fascinating character,
one John Robinette, who had lived in the area for
(12:56):
his entire life. He had worked as a notary, public,
a car mechanic, a carnival barker. That's something that happens
in a lot of small towns. There will be people
who have multiple different types of occupation depending upon the
service needed at any given day. You know, So the
person who runs the grocery store might also be the
person who hosts the annual harvest festival or something. Right,
(13:19):
the person who's the dentist might also be the youth pastor. Yeah,
sort of the way that football coaches that often teach
history in high school, right, oddly enough, or social studies,
that's the other one. So this guy, John Robinette, he
is so sad that Miss Holly is not getting her
living room. Sweet it moves him on an emotional level,
(13:43):
and he says, so I up and appointed myself mayor
and set out to get us a bridge because the
bridge had obviously collapsed. Miss Holly was seventy four years old.
She had to hire herself a boy to go fetch
a few sticks of furniture and haul it back against
the law on railroad property private property. And so he
(14:05):
made it his mission as self appointed mayor to UH
to prosecute for the construction of this new bridge and
talked to regional politicians, area politicians. He eventually gets as
far as speaking to the office of former Governor Arch Moore. However,
(14:27):
it's a close but no cigar situation, a close but
no bridge situation, and it's for a little bit of contact.
This article from the New York Times that you can
find online is from nineteen seventy eight, so this is
a very contemporary account of this problem. So what happens
is Phillis Blankenship, who ran the sixteen post office box
(14:47):
post office in vulcan Um, recounts the story like this.
He the person who appointed himself mayor Mr Robinette, got
on the phone, got on the horn with the governor
and demanded bridge be builts, demanded satisfaction um and close
but no cigar. So you know what's the obvious next step.
(15:10):
He's been turned down by the government of his own city, abandoned,
left in the cold. You know they're doing this this
town based around this very dangerous occupation contributing to the
the economy of the state. And the governor says, no,
thank you, You are forgotten. You were marooned and forgotten.
(15:32):
So Mr Robinette comes up with what I would say
is one of the most brilliant uses of like pr blackmail.
Almost yeah, yeah, So it's uh, nineteen seventies six. They've
just been stonewalled every time, every time they ask for
a little bit of help. Again, the bridge that collapsed
(15:55):
was the only legal way in and out of the town.
People were having to drive illegally on this this flimsy
ribbon of gravel that the train company owned. Uh. They
every time they asked, they were told there was no money.
There's no money available to spend on the bridge, according
to reports from the West Virginia Gazette. So this is
(16:16):
what Robinette does. Mayor Robinette writes to not the local paper,
he's already done that, Not the New York Times, any
paper of note. Instead, he writes directly to the U. S.
S R. The Soviet Union, and he says, Hi, I'm
the mayor of Vulcan, West Virginia, a small town here
in the United States, and we are our town is
(16:40):
gonna die if we don't get this bridge of the
state is not gonna fund us. And in my in
my opinion, dear Russians, I don't think Uncle Sam cares
one whit about us. He sends this letter to the
Soviet embassy in Washington, d C. And at first, you know,
at first it's like, well, is this a joke? Is
(17:02):
this just a prank, a little bit of trolling, And
the Soviet government doesn't immediately answer until that is Robinette
is contacted directly by a journalist named Iona and Dronov,
Soviet reporter who wants to hear this story in person.
So in UM December of n seven, this reporter Andronov
(17:26):
touches down in vulcan and starts making the rounds, getting
the scoop, pounding the pavement for the gravel, I guess
and uh, asking questions of the residents, and broadcasting it
to the rest of the world. Right right, So Andronov
works for UM publication in Moscow called Litta Naval Gazeta.
(17:48):
And this is solid gold, platinum level ammunition for the
propaganda war that's going on between the uss Are and
the US. The problem is from Uncle Sam's side that
US papers also knew a good headline when they see it,
(18:10):
and the US based publications pick it up as well,
so in a way they are disseminating Russian propaganda for
the U. S. S R. The Spokane Daily Chronicle writes
about this in seventy seven with the following quote, Soviet
officials well am used today by reports at the small
town of Voltan, West Virginia, has appealed to the Kremlin
(18:30):
for four and eight. The town, with a population of
two ask the Sovia government full financial help to build
a bridge after the town was turned down by the U. S.
And West Virginia governments. It's crazy that newsman still talked
like them in the late seventies, especially since it was
a printed paper not a radio announcement. Well, you know,
sometimes they have to dictate, you know. So this is
(18:51):
this is also during the U not the height of
the Red Scare communist panic, but this is still a
time and place where people accuse you of being a
communist as an insult, or ask you if you were
a card carrying communist. Someone did ask in and oath
and he said yes, actually, yeah, that's sort of our thing.
Uh yeah. It got so far as to for their
(19:13):
being rumors circulating in the community that there would be
bomb attacks on any bridge that was built with communist cash,
so you know, it really created a hubbub and that
those headlines really were disseminated. Because this is quite a
juicy story. So of course, all of a sudden, the
good old us of a as we we don't like,
(19:34):
we don't like to be made fun of, we don't
like to be made to seem cheap, even though we
we kind of are a lot of the time, Um
acquiesced and was like, okay, okay, we can do this.
We can we can muster the money that we need
now that you've put our nose to the fire. Will
give you one point three million and we'll get you
your little bridge. Because here's the thing, though, it's like
(19:56):
it was really not the families that stayed behind to
the coal industry crumbled. We're kind of these holdouts. They
didn't have anyhere else to go, They couldn't afford to
move perhaps, and they you know, this was their home.
And it was only like in the dozens of families
that lived in this very small area, right, it was
less than it was less than a hundred families, maybe
(20:16):
maybe fifty families. But this is okay, this is where
the story divides. This is where there are two different
versions of the story, two different narratives that persist in
the modern day. So, yes, the West Virginian government does
agree to build this bridge, or at least provide the
(20:38):
funds to build a bridge. But they do it like
within hours after and the nov actually gets into Vulcan.
They do it so quickly, So let's let's kick through
two different versions of this story. As The New York
Times puts it, whether by coincidence or design, the state
of West Virginia announced on the same day of Andrewnova's
(21:03):
visit that Vulcan would get this bridge. They like the
same day he was there, he announced. I wonder if
that was because of some intelligence gathering maybe. Yeah. So
the papers have been the US papers and the Moscow papers. Uh,
we're we're aware of this too, And that means certainly
(21:23):
the intelligence apparatus was also Coakinson. But from the official
US government perspective, the explanation of this was West Virginia's
explanation is that they just they were just in the
approval process for months and months. It just takes a
long time to approve that much money and the West
(21:46):
Virginian government. But to the people of Vulcan and if
we're being honest, to most of the people reading this
story from the outside, it seemed like they only reacted
this way because it was an international embarrassment because Mayor
John Robinette had just brought a Russian person down there,
(22:07):
and he said Also Robinette, for his part, said he
doesn't he doesn't care where the money comes from. He
just wants the bridge built. He just wants this Holly
to get her living room sweet with some dignity. You
really tie the room together. It was really important for
her to have that living room suite. But here's the thing.
(22:29):
I mean it. It just goes to show how sometimes
a little weaponized pr move is exactly what it takes
to get those in power to act. It's never doing
the right thing, or often not. It's much more about
holding their feet of the fire and making them fear
the potential of looking foolish. Right, And in this case
(22:52):
it worked. Two years later, two years after this hubbub
and brew haha, on July, the bridge opened. It cost
a little over one million dollars and the price was
ultimately split between the governments of West Virginia and Kentucky.
The residents of Vulcans celebrated the opening of what they
(23:14):
called the bridge the Russians almost built, with an American
flag waving in the breeze and a cartoonishly large amount
of illegally imported vodka. Now here's the post script of
the story, or at least the fictionalized PostScript, the part
where the US government, in a blatant act of revenge,
(23:34):
poisons all the remaining UH inhabitants, you know, in their sleep,
because you don't mess with you know, you mess with
the bull, you get the horns. Yeah, I don't know
that's not true, but I would be pissed. Wouldn't you
be pissed if you were Uncle sam Um. It depends
on the different levels, you know, on a federal level,
(23:55):
probably would be more irritated with the Um with the
state government, like where I president at the time, I
wouldn't be irritated with the residents of Vulcan I wouldn't
even be that irritated with the Soviets. I'd be irritated
with the governor of West Virginia. That's a good point,
you know, what I mean, may it rolls downhill? My
(24:16):
friend really does. So this this is fascinating, and this
stunt was successful. We have to wonder whether something like
this could be replicated somewhere else in the world, and
we're working with our research associate, Christopher Haciotis. One thing
we found was that there are plenty of other examples
(24:39):
of foreign aid being given to the US or other
countries attempting to give foreign aid to the US, like famously,
the Messiah in Kenya after the tragedy of nine eleven
on September eleventh, two thousand and one, the attack on
the World Trade Center, the Massi donated cattle to the U. S.
(25:00):
Did you do you remember this story? Do not? Yeah?
It's heartwarmings. So the Massi live in a relatively rural
area of Kenya, but when they learned what happened in
New York on September eleven, they were they were so
(25:21):
horrified and sad. They felt like they needed to do something.
So they blessed fourteen cows and a pretty solemn ceremony
and then gave these cows to the Deputy Chief of
Mission at the U. S Embassy and Narrobi, a guy
named William brand Kick and they said, here, please bring
these two the people of New York and let them know,
(25:43):
you know that they are in our thoughts. And I thought,
I thought that was hard warming, because that's not propaganda
at all. That's just being very human, you know what
I mean. So I want to bringing that example up
because I do want to point out that not every
foreign act of charity is a propaganda move. The Russian
one was, though, totally the record. Yeah, and now, um,
(26:06):
you can, I think, still visit this area through that
very bridge that was constructed, the bridge that the Russians
almost built, which is now a single um small two
lane road bridge over the Tug which is just a
single lane tunnel bridge that is covered in graffiti, which
I love that in it. It's almost like its own
(26:28):
little mini Berlin Wall. And this is where our story
ends today. However, never fear it's not the end of
our show. We will be back with more strange dare
we say, ridiculous tales of people, places and events throughout
this uh, the weird experiment that we call human civilization.
In the meantime, we want to hear from you, folks.
(26:50):
Do you have any stories from I in particular, will
be um personally fascinated by any stories of the Appalachian Mountains.
But regardless of where you live in the world, do
you have any stories like this, any very isolated towns
that had to use unorthodox means to for survival? Yeah,
(27:10):
any bridge related stories? And hey, if you're a New Yorker,
are you a bridge or a tunnel person? What do
you prefer? Let it really is cab drivers are often
after that, and I'm like, I don't know which which
everyone's best. I think part of it is, you know,
the cab drivers will present it in terms of what's
better given traffic patterns. But a lot of people do
have crippling fears of either going on bridges like my
(27:33):
my mother hates bridges, or they have a fear of
going into the ground, you know. So it's really is
a polite way to ask which terrifies you least. That's
a really interesting way of looking at it, And I
never thought of that, So let us know which terrifies
you most, or at least you can write to us
at Ridiculous at how stuff works dot com. You can
check out our social media presencies at Facebook, where you
(27:58):
can join our grew called the Ridiculous Historians, which we
find to be a lot of fun, and you can
follow us both personally. We have our very own instagrams. No,
you've got one, Yeah, it's at Embryonic Insider and I'm
at ben Boland Thinks as always to our super producer
Casey Pegram. Thanks to our research associate friend of the show,
(28:22):
Christopher Haciotas, who were overdue to have a guest appearance,
really are and he's always the best. In fact, sometimes
on the one that you have to do to join
the Ridiculous Stories on Facebook is say who name one
of us as the host? And occasionally some whole named Christopher,
which I appreciate because he appears so infrequently, his appearances
must really make an impact. I love, I love all
the guests that we have on our show, and you
(28:44):
know it gets weird, but always weird in a good way.
Thanks also to Alex Williams who composed our track, to
our research associate Gabe and no thanks to the people
of West Virginia. Really there are resilient people and they
know how to get stuff done. We'll see you next time, folks,
Hello, Hi, how are you? Thank you for tuning into
Ridiculous History. Several of us listening today will be familiar
with an area of the world known as Appalachia, the Appalachians,
Appalachian Mountains, right, I've got I've got some past there. Um.
And the thing that's interesting about it is, even if
(00:44):
you live in the US, odds are that you have
not been there because it's it's quite a rural area,
but it's where today's story takes place. My name is Ben,
my name is nel Ben. Have you did you know
that if if you hike certain parts of the Appalachian Trail,
you get little rings on your walking stick or there's
some kind of merit badge you're supposed to get where
(01:04):
you can show on equivocally that you have hiked the
entire Appalachian Trail. I have. I have exactly zero of those.
I also well have hiked parts of the trail. I
have not hiked the entire thing. It's a heck of
a commitment, but it's a noble thing to do, Almost
as noble as being the producer on shows like Ridiculous History,
(01:27):
which reminds me should shout out our super producer, Casey
peg group. So, no, you have never hiked the trail,
but you've been to the Appalachians. Yeah, I have, and
I've I've been on parts of the trail. That's where
I found out about the medallion system, where it's these
little kind of curved metal pieces that indicate which parts
of the trail you successfully completed. And if you're like
(01:49):
a real ball or a real Appalachian trailhead, you have
a stick that's just like you know, covered in these things,
right right, just lousy with them. Well, one of the
most interesting thing about exploring this area of the world
is that you'll run into places where time seems to
have slowed down or things go at their own relatively
(02:12):
isolated pace. And in today's episode, we're going to explore
a tiny community that is, in its own way, very isolated.
It's called Vulcan in the western edge of West Virginia.
That's about as west as it gets, my friend, right, Okay,
that's that's actually not entirely true, but it's as west
(02:32):
as it gets in West Virginia. Right, it's a Virginia wise,
this is the west ist. Vulcan. West Virginia is an
interesting case. It's located along the Tug Fork, which is uh,
you know, part of the Tug River, and this is
often called one of the us is most storied waterways.
(02:54):
Vulcan is named after you know, spoiler alert, the god
of fire and Roman athology, Vulcan, and this is something
we had talked about off air. Vulcan makes an appearance
in a fantastic novel and set of TV adaptations called
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. You saw that, right, I
did a season two out yet or it's about to
(03:18):
come out. Yeah, um, I'm I'm excited. That's one of
those shows where I don't know about everybody else, but
I made the decision a while back that if I
really enjoy a show, I want to wait until the
entire season is out before watching it because Netflix ruined me. Man.
I just I can't watch something and wait for a
week and hope it shows up next week. It just
(03:39):
it triggers all kinds of you know, abandonment issues and patients.
You know, I'll tell you, I actually kind of I
like it in a different way. I like being with
the band, but I also like the old school cliffhanger
having to wait a week mentality of traditional television release.
I'll do that with maybe Game of Thrones. Game of
Thrones did it with True Detective, you know, the ones
(03:59):
that are edge of your cedars. I halfway did it
with True Detective Season three. Watched the first four episodes
and I said, oh wait, then you took a couple
of weeks off and then you had some little binge
abole episodes for you. Yep. In the case of Vulcan,
West Virginia, we find a town that is very much
(04:21):
isolated by geography more so than say culture. Right, we
could we talk a little bit about where Vulcan is.
We said, it's it's in this very southwestern corner of
West Virginia. But what's it around, Well, it's I mean,
it's kind of its own, weird little island in some ways,
and that there's no connection to the surrounding um areas
(04:45):
except through a little footbridge at the Norfolk and Western
Railway runs through the middle of the town um and
that separates the two sides of the town um from
one being low caated on the river bank. And then
there are ones that are up more inland on a
(05:05):
hill um that is very near to a cemetery called
Vulcan Hill. Uh. And here's the thing. I mean, even
to get out of the city, out of this little hamlet,
you would have to sometimes cross underneath parked railway cars.
Um kids, school kids had to catch the bus on
(05:25):
the Kentucky side in order to get there. They had
to go to some pretty perilous ends to to catch
the bus. And some kids have even been injured. And
I believe there was a case of a child losing
a leg um in such a situation. Yeah, yeah, it's
absolutely true. So we're looking at mountains, rivers, terrain that
(05:47):
is very difficult to traverse, so much so that had
coal not been discovered in the general vicinity here, you
could make a fairly strong argument that no one would
be living there at all. You know, maybe maybe some
guy decades and decades ago would have hit a moonshine
still out there, but even that would be um pretty arduous.
(06:11):
It's still be a lot of work to get there. However,
when coal was discovered in this area the very beginning
of the twentieth century, a mining camp was constructed and
this would later grow into what we recognize as Vulcan
West Virginia. But but the the thing is when the
(06:33):
mining camp was first constructed, when coal was first discovered there,
the miners who lived in the area had to row
across the river every day just to go to work,
that's right. And it wasn't until that mining company created
this very narrow wooden footbridge, um that folks could actually
get in and out of town without having to get wet. Um.
(06:54):
So the thing I was talking about with the kids
and the railway cars, that was a little bit there. Yeah, yeah,
that was a little bit later. But it's an excellent
example of the importance of this bridge and the problems
with this bridge. Picture this, if we're going to do
a rod Sterling intro picture this town. There's one way in,
(07:17):
there's one way out, and that's when the bridge is working,
drives straight into the Vulcan zone. So so the I'm
freestyling here. So over the years, the people who lived
in this community, realizing the key nature of this bridge,
they took great care to maintain it. And when automobiles arrived,
(07:42):
when they became a thing in this part of the world,
the people of Vulcan took upon themselves to expand this
bridge so that they could drive these vehicles across However,
to your point, Knell, when we say expanding, we mean
that they just bear made it big enough for one
car to drive across. Yeah, and this was d I
(08:05):
y ingenuity at his finest, because they didn't have somebody
swooping in to help them with infrastructure. It was literally
an effort of the townspeople to solve a problem they
needed solved. And to cross that bridge, a swinging footbridge
on a car. Good lord, that sounds like the most
terrifying experience ever of all time. No, no, thank you,
sir or madam. The way that The New York Times
(08:26):
described this bridge in an article on December sixteenth, ninety
eight by an author named Gregory Jeans, was that there
was no more than a quote thumb length margin for
error on either side. Have you ever driven around in
the mountains snow? Yeah, with the crazy switchbacks and like
where you're right off the edge of the cliff, like
(08:49):
he were so close, especially when you can't see what's
in front of you and you were just trusting that
around that that turn, You're not just gonna plummet to
your death. Oh and you know what this makes me?
Remember in we did an epic road rally car trip. Casey,
you were there and know you were there, and I
was there as well as my good friends Scott Benjamin.
(09:09):
We had to drive through parts of West Virginia that
were exactly like the switchbacks and all. That's where that's
where my main memories of it come from. Is that
very sketchy leg of that trip. And Scott. I don't
know if you know this about Scott, folks, but he
is a bit of a speed demon. He's got a
lead foot. Yeah, he was not. He was taking those
(09:31):
curbs like Steve McQueen and leaving us kind of clutched,
at least being personally clutching my my pearls. That's that's
why I pressured him to switch switch to the wheel
and ride Shotgun for a while and let me drive.
But if you've if you've ever been not just in
the Appalachian area, but if you've ever been in a
(09:52):
mountainous area in general in the car, you know what
we're talking about. These very narrow roads and lanes that
hug the side of the incline with maybe maybe some
wooden railing, maybe nothing, uh, And it can be very
disconcerting if you're a person who doesn't drive there every
day because people who drive there every day this is
(10:12):
a normal experience to them, So they think that they'll
think that you are driving like um, you know, like
an like an elderly person, right whereas we'll think they're
driving like lunatics. This is one of those bridges, but
it's not just in the mountainous area. It's over water,
there's not much margin for error. And then throughout the
(10:35):
decades right there, they're taking care of this bridge. It's
an a key artery of the town. But as we know,
as recent history is shown, coal mining doesn't last forever.
Toward the nineteen sixties or so, the coal resources begin
to dry up and the town feels like it's entering
(10:57):
an economic decline. It feels like there's trouble. But they
still have the bridge, at least that is until July nineteen. Yeah,
that's when, you know, despite their best efforts to keep
it up. I mean, they're not professional bridge caretakers, and
you know, understandably they've got work to do down in
those other dangerous part of town being the mines um.
So the bridge collapses at crumbles and it leaves them
(11:21):
pretty much for all intended purposes in an automobile based
society at this point, cut off from the outside world. Yeah,
and in desperate need of some assistance. So even though
things had never been particularly opulent in the town of Vulcan,
West Virginia, now things seemed increasingly desperate. One person in
the town described it as living at the tail end
(11:44):
of nothing. They knew that this situation was unsustainable. The
town depended upon this bridge. Around the time of the
bridge collapse, a woman named Nelly Holly had ordered a
living room sweep from up state further up in West Virginia,
and the truck arrived with the furniture, but the driver
(12:08):
refused to bring the goods to the Holly household because
the driver learned that the only road in the Vulcan
was this How does it described a ribbon of gravel
and it wasn't even public property right now, it belonged
to the railway. Says it was more of it more
or less an access road, Uh, not intended for this
kind of use, and kind of in a similar situation
(12:31):
we were talking about, and that it was very narrow,
very dangerous, and you'd be putting yourself at risk, and
especially since it it would technically be trespassing on private property.
And so now we introduce you to a fascinating character,
one John Robinette, who had lived in the area for
(12:56):
his entire life. He had worked as a notary, public,
a car mechanic, a carnival barker. That's something that happens
in a lot of small towns. There will be people
who have multiple different types of occupation depending upon the
service needed at any given day. You know, So the
person who runs the grocery store might also be the
person who hosts the annual harvest festival or something. Right,
(13:19):
the person who's the dentist might also be the youth pastor. Yeah,
sort of the way that football coaches that often teach
history in high school, right, oddly enough, or social studies,
that's the other one. So this guy, John Robinette, he
is so sad that Miss Holly is not getting her
living room. Sweet it moves him on an emotional level,
(13:43):
and he says, so I up and appointed myself mayor
and set out to get us a bridge because the
bridge had obviously collapsed. Miss Holly was seventy four years old.
She had to hire herself a boy to go fetch
a few sticks of furniture and haul it back against
the law on railroad property private property. And so he
(14:05):
made it his mission as self appointed mayor to UH
to prosecute for the construction of this new bridge and
talked to regional politicians, area politicians. He eventually gets as
far as speaking to the office of former Governor Arch Moore. However,
(14:27):
it's a close but no cigar situation, a close but
no bridge situation, and it's for a little bit of contact.
This article from the New York Times that you can
find online is from nineteen seventy eight, so this is
a very contemporary account of this problem. So what happens
is Phillis Blankenship, who ran the sixteen post office box
(14:47):
post office in vulcan Um, recounts the story like this.
He the person who appointed himself mayor Mr Robinette, got
on the phone, got on the horn with the governor
and demanded bridge be builts, demanded satisfaction um and close
but no cigar. So you know what's the obvious next step.
(15:10):
He's been turned down by the government of his own city, abandoned,
left in the cold. You know they're doing this this
town based around this very dangerous occupation contributing to the
the economy of the state. And the governor says, no,
thank you, You are forgotten. You were marooned and forgotten.
(15:32):
So Mr Robinette comes up with what I would say
is one of the most brilliant uses of like pr blackmail.
Almost yeah, yeah, So it's uh, nineteen seventies six. They've
just been stonewalled every time, every time they ask for
a little bit of help. Again, the bridge that collapsed
(15:55):
was the only legal way in and out of the town.
People were having to drive illegally on this this flimsy
ribbon of gravel that the train company owned. Uh. They
every time they asked, they were told there was no money.
There's no money available to spend on the bridge, according
to reports from the West Virginia Gazette. So this is
(16:16):
what Robinette does. Mayor Robinette writes to not the local paper,
he's already done that, Not the New York Times, any
paper of note. Instead, he writes directly to the U. S.
S R. The Soviet Union, and he says, Hi, I'm
the mayor of Vulcan, West Virginia, a small town here
in the United States, and we are our town is
(16:40):
gonna die if we don't get this bridge of the
state is not gonna fund us. And in my in
my opinion, dear Russians, I don't think Uncle Sam cares
one whit about us. He sends this letter to the
Soviet embassy in Washington, d C. And at first, you know,
at first it's like, well, is this a joke? Is
(17:02):
this just a prank, a little bit of trolling, And
the Soviet government doesn't immediately answer until that is Robinette
is contacted directly by a journalist named Iona and Dronov,
Soviet reporter who wants to hear this story in person.
So in UM December of n seven, this reporter Andronov
(17:26):
touches down in vulcan and starts making the rounds, getting
the scoop, pounding the pavement for the gravel, I guess
and uh, asking questions of the residents, and broadcasting it
to the rest of the world. Right right, So Andronov
works for UM publication in Moscow called Litta Naval Gazeta.
(17:48):
And this is solid gold, platinum level ammunition for the
propaganda war that's going on between the uss Are and
the US. The problem is from Uncle Sam's side that
US papers also knew a good headline when they see it,
(18:10):
and the US based publications pick it up as well,
so in a way they are disseminating Russian propaganda for
the U. S. S R. The Spokane Daily Chronicle writes
about this in seventy seven with the following quote, Soviet
officials well am used today by reports at the small
town of Voltan, West Virginia, has appealed to the Kremlin
(18:30):
for four and eight. The town, with a population of
two ask the Sovia government full financial help to build
a bridge after the town was turned down by the U. S.
And West Virginia governments. It's crazy that newsman still talked
like them in the late seventies, especially since it was
a printed paper not a radio announcement. Well, you know,
sometimes they have to dictate, you know. So this is
(18:51):
this is also during the U not the height of
the Red Scare communist panic, but this is still a
time and place where people accuse you of being a
communist as an insult, or ask you if you were
a card carrying communist. Someone did ask in and oath
and he said yes, actually, yeah, that's sort of our thing.
Uh yeah. It got so far as to for their
(19:13):
being rumors circulating in the community that there would be
bomb attacks on any bridge that was built with communist cash,
so you know, it really created a hubbub and that
those headlines really were disseminated. Because this is quite a
juicy story. So of course, all of a sudden, the
good old us of a as we we don't like,
(19:34):
we don't like to be made fun of, we don't
like to be made to seem cheap, even though we
we kind of are a lot of the time, Um
acquiesced and was like, okay, okay, we can do this.
We can we can muster the money that we need
now that you've put our nose to the fire. Will
give you one point three million and we'll get you
your little bridge. Because here's the thing, though, it's like
(19:56):
it was really not the families that stayed behind to
the coal industry crumbled. We're kind of these holdouts. They
didn't have anyhere else to go, They couldn't afford to
move perhaps, and they you know, this was their home.
And it was only like in the dozens of families
that lived in this very small area, right, it was
less than it was less than a hundred families, maybe
(20:16):
maybe fifty families. But this is okay, this is where
the story divides. This is where there are two different
versions of the story, two different narratives that persist in
the modern day. So, yes, the West Virginian government does
agree to build this bridge, or at least provide the
(20:38):
funds to build a bridge. But they do it like
within hours after and the nov actually gets into Vulcan.
They do it so quickly, So let's let's kick through
two different versions of this story. As The New York
Times puts it, whether by coincidence or design, the state
of West Virginia announced on the same day of Andrewnova's
(21:03):
visit that Vulcan would get this bridge. They like the
same day he was there, he announced. I wonder if
that was because of some intelligence gathering maybe. Yeah. So
the papers have been the US papers and the Moscow papers. Uh,
we're we're aware of this too, And that means certainly
(21:23):
the intelligence apparatus was also Coakinson. But from the official
US government perspective, the explanation of this was West Virginia's
explanation is that they just they were just in the
approval process for months and months. It just takes a
long time to approve that much money and the West
(21:46):
Virginian government. But to the people of Vulcan and if
we're being honest, to most of the people reading this
story from the outside, it seemed like they only reacted
this way because it was an international embarrassment because Mayor
John Robinette had just brought a Russian person down there,
(22:07):
and he said Also Robinette, for his part, said he
doesn't he doesn't care where the money comes from. He
just wants the bridge built. He just wants this Holly
to get her living room sweet with some dignity. You
really tie the room together. It was really important for
her to have that living room suite. But here's the thing.
(22:29):
I mean it. It just goes to show how sometimes
a little weaponized pr move is exactly what it takes
to get those in power to act. It's never doing
the right thing, or often not. It's much more about
holding their feet of the fire and making them fear
the potential of looking foolish. Right, And in this case
(22:52):
it worked. Two years later, two years after this hubbub
and brew haha, on July, the bridge opened. It cost
a little over one million dollars and the price was
ultimately split between the governments of West Virginia and Kentucky.
The residents of Vulcans celebrated the opening of what they
(23:14):
called the bridge the Russians almost built, with an American
flag waving in the breeze and a cartoonishly large amount
of illegally imported vodka. Now here's the post script of
the story, or at least the fictionalized PostScript, the part
where the US government, in a blatant act of revenge,
(23:34):
poisons all the remaining UH inhabitants, you know, in their sleep,
because you don't mess with you know, you mess with
the bull, you get the horns. Yeah, I don't know
that's not true, but I would be pissed. Wouldn't you
be pissed if you were Uncle sam Um. It depends
on the different levels, you know, on a federal level,
(23:55):
probably would be more irritated with the Um with the
state government, like where I president at the time, I
wouldn't be irritated with the residents of Vulcan I wouldn't
even be that irritated with the Soviets. I'd be irritated
with the governor of West Virginia. That's a good point,
you know, what I mean, may it rolls downhill? My
(24:16):
friend really does. So this this is fascinating, and this
stunt was successful. We have to wonder whether something like
this could be replicated somewhere else in the world, and
we're working with our research associate, Christopher Haciotis. One thing
we found was that there are plenty of other examples
(24:39):
of foreign aid being given to the US or other
countries attempting to give foreign aid to the US, like famously,
the Messiah in Kenya after the tragedy of nine eleven
on September eleventh, two thousand and one, the attack on
the World Trade Center, the Massi donated cattle to the U. S.
(25:00):
Did you do you remember this story? Do not? Yeah?
It's heartwarmings. So the Massi live in a relatively rural
area of Kenya, but when they learned what happened in
New York on September eleven, they were they were so
(25:21):
horrified and sad. They felt like they needed to do something.
So they blessed fourteen cows and a pretty solemn ceremony
and then gave these cows to the Deputy Chief of
Mission at the U. S Embassy and Narrobi, a guy
named William brand Kick and they said, here, please bring
these two the people of New York and let them know,
(25:43):
you know that they are in our thoughts. And I thought,
I thought that was hard warming, because that's not propaganda
at all. That's just being very human, you know what
I mean. So I want to bringing that example up
because I do want to point out that not every
foreign act of charity is a propaganda move. The Russian
one was, though, totally the record. Yeah, and now, um,
(26:06):
you can, I think, still visit this area through that
very bridge that was constructed, the bridge that the Russians
almost built, which is now a single um small two
lane road bridge over the Tug which is just a
single lane tunnel bridge that is covered in graffiti, which
I love that in it. It's almost like its own
(26:28):
little mini Berlin Wall. And this is where our story
ends today. However, never fear it's not the end of
our show. We will be back with more strange dare
we say, ridiculous tales of people, places and events throughout
this uh, the weird experiment that we call human civilization.
In the meantime, we want to hear from you, folks.
(26:50):
Do you have any stories from I in particular, will
be um personally fascinated by any stories of the Appalachian Mountains.
But regardless of where you live in the world, do
you have any stories like this, any very isolated towns
that had to use unorthodox means to for survival? Yeah,
(27:10):
any bridge related stories? And hey, if you're a New Yorker,
are you a bridge or a tunnel person? What do
you prefer? Let it really is cab drivers are often
after that, and I'm like, I don't know which which
everyone's best. I think part of it is, you know,
the cab drivers will present it in terms of what's
better given traffic patterns. But a lot of people do
have crippling fears of either going on bridges like my
(27:33):
my mother hates bridges, or they have a fear of
going into the ground, you know. So it's really is
a polite way to ask which terrifies you least. That's
a really interesting way of looking at it, And I
never thought of that, So let us know which terrifies
you most, or at least you can write to us
at Ridiculous at how stuff works dot com. You can
check out our social media presencies at Facebook, where you
(27:58):
can join our grew called the Ridiculous Historians, which we
find to be a lot of fun, and you can
follow us both personally. We have our very own instagrams. No,
you've got one, Yeah, it's at Embryonic Insider and I'm
at ben Boland Thinks as always to our super producer
Casey Pegram. Thanks to our research associate friend of the show,
(28:22):
Christopher Haciotas, who were overdue to have a guest appearance,
really are and he's always the best. In fact, sometimes
on the one that you have to do to join
the Ridiculous Stories on Facebook is say who name one
of us as the host? And occasionally some whole named Christopher,
which I appreciate because he appears so infrequently, his appearances
must really make an impact. I love, I love all
the guests that we have on our show, and you
(28:44):
know it gets weird, but always weird in a good way.
Thanks also to Alex Williams who composed our track, to
our research associate Gabe and no thanks to the people
of West Virginia. Really there are resilient people and they
know how to get stuff done. We'll see you next time, folks,
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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