Chapter 1

A Town Between a River and a Mountain

Vulcan sits in Mingo County, in the far southwestern corner of West Virginia, pressed into a narrow strip of land with a mountain at its back and the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River in front. Across the river is Kentucky. The community took its name from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire — a fitting name for a place built by coal.

Like dozens of towns along the Tug Valley, Vulcan grew up as a coal camp in the early twentieth century. It was built along the main line of the Norfolk & Western Railway, and in the era when passenger trains still ran, the railroad was the town's connection to the world. When the mines played out in the 1960s, the jobs and much of the population went with them. The people who stayed were left in one of the most awkward pieces of geography in Appalachia.

Here was the problem: no public road was ever built to Vulcan on the West Virginia side of the river. Maps showed a state road that didn't actually exist. The only way in or out was to drive up the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork and cross back over the river on a narrow swinging footbridge — a bridge built by a coal company decades earlier, too narrow for a car.

Chapter 2

When the Bridge Disappeared

By the early 1970s the old swinging bridge was rotting. Boards were missing. It swayed over the water, and everyone in Vulcan knew it was living on borrowed time. Then, in the middle of the decade, it collapsed into the Tug Fork — and Vulcan's last legal route to the outside world went with it.

What is not in dispute is what came next. With the bridge gone, the only way in or out was the Norfolk & Western railroad right-of-way — a narrow gravel maintenance path beside live tracks. It was private property, it was illegal, and it was dangerous. The railroad locked its entrances and prosecuted people it caught trespassing.

People risked it anyway, because there was no choice. Children crawled under parked railroad cars at the railroad's bridge to get to school; on one occasion, a student lost a leg doing it. Drivers tried to squeeze their vehicles along the service road beside the tracks. Twice, according to local accounts, elderly couples flinched at approaching trains, jerked their trucks, and ended up in the river.

Chapter 3

The Man Who Wouldn't Give Up

Vulcan had no town government — it was an unincorporated community, too small and too poor to matter much to anyone in a capital city. What it had was John Robinette.

The frustration ran deeper than one bridge. Vulcan's isolation had been documented for years. Huey Perry's 1972 book They'll Cut Off Your Project, a classic study of the poverty wars in Mingo County, devoted several pages to earlier, unsuccessful attempts to solve Vulcan's access problem. The town had been asking for help long before anyone thought of writing to the Kremlin.

But Vulcan was a small, economically struggling community in a forgotten corner of a poor state. Its requests were easy to ignore. Robinette understood that polite requests had failed — so he decided to make ignoring Vulcan embarrassing.

Chapter 4

A Letter to America's Greatest Rival

In September 1977, Robinette wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., asking whether the Soviet Union's foreign aid program could help build a bridge for Vulcan. By several accounts, an appeal also went to East Germany. The letter explained the town's situation plainly: the bridge had collapsed, the people were stranded, and their own government would not help.

The exact wording of the letter hasn't survived in the public record, and retellings have dressed it up over the years. What matters is what it said at its core: an American town, in writing, asking the Kremlin for the kind of help its own government had refused to provide.

It is hard to overstate how provocative that was in 1977. The Cold War was the defining struggle of the era. The Soviet Union was America's principal rival — the country schoolchildren drilled against and politicians campaigned against. And here was an American community, in the heart of coal country, formally requesting Communist foreign aid.

The letter made headlines across the nation. Newspapers from New York to Spokane picked up the story of the little town that had asked Moscow for help. And then the story got stranger: the Soviets responded.

Chapter 5

The Russians Come to West Virginia

The official Soviet response to Robinette's letter was never formally recorded. But not long after it arrived, a New York-based Soviet journalist named Iona Andronov — a correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta — asked the U.S. State Department for permission to visit Vulcan and talk with Robinette and the townspeople.

Permission was granted, and in mid-December 1977, Andronov came to Vulcan. He walked the riverbank, saw where the bridge had been, and met the people who lived with the consequences. The West Virginia Encyclopedia dates his visit to December 19; other accounts say December 17. Either way, a Soviet journalist was standing in an American coal town, documenting American neglect, in the middle of the Cold War.

The American press swarmed the story. Here was a spectacle almost too perfect: a representative of the Soviet Union touring a stranded Appalachian community that its own government had left behind. A Russian charity committee said it was willing to consider a donation to help. The propaganda value for Moscow was obvious, and everyone knew it.

“Lord, Lord, get me out of this mess.”

Not everyone was amused. According to later accounts, threats were made — including bomb threats against any bridge built with Communist help. Robinette, who had wanted attention, now had more of it than he knew what to do with.

Chapter 6

Suddenly, There Was Money for a Bridge

Then came the coincidence that made Vulcan famous. Almost simultaneously with Andronov's visit — by some accounts, within an hour of it — West Virginia officials announced that a new bridge would be built at Vulcan. State Highway Commissioner Charles L. Miller announced a $500,000, one-lane bridge, to be built within a year.

“The state was embarrassed into it.”

The New York Times couldn't resist the joke. If the Soviets were truly interested in extending foreign aid to American communities, the paper suggested tongue in cheek, then New York City — then deep in its own fiscal crisis — would be a far worthier challenge than Vulcan.

Chapter 7

The Bridge Finally Opens

Promises were one thing; concrete was another. The announced one-year timeline slipped, as Vulcan had learned to expect. A December 1978 dispatch in the New York Times found the town still stranded, still waiting, still using the railroad's gravel path.

But in 1980, more than two years after the announcement, the work was finished. The state legislature had ultimately granted $1.3 million, and Vulcan got its bridge: a one-lane concrete span across the Tug Fork, connecting the community to Kentucky Route 194 and, through Kentucky, to the rest of West Virginia and the world.

Later retellings have added colorful details to the opening — a Fourth of July celebration, toasts with Russian vodka. They're wonderful details, and they may even be true, but we couldn't confirm them in reliable historical sources, so we've left them out of the record here. The documented facts need no decoration: a town of about two hundred people asked the Soviet Union for help, and got its bridge.

No Soviet money ever built anything in Vulcan. The bridge was American, paid for by the state of West Virginia. But the people of Vulcan have always known who deserved the credit — and it wasn't Charleston.

Chapter 8

What Vulcan Taught America

The Vulcan story is usually told as a Cold War curiosity — the town that asked the Russians for a bridge. But the Cold War was only the stage. The real story is older and more uncomfortable: a small Appalachian community was left without a safe way in or out, and every level of its own government decided it wasn't worth the money.

Vulcan's people didn't accept that. They couldn't vote harder or donate to campaigns or hire lobbyists. What they could do — what John Robinette did — was find the one lever available to the powerless: embarrassment. A letter to the Kremlin turned a local inconvenience into an international headline, and headlines, unlike petitions, could not be filed away.

The bridge Robinette fought for still carries people across the Tug Fork today. Vulcan itself is smaller than ever — the coal is gone, and most of the people with it. But the story endures, because it says something true about America: sometimes the only way to get your government to notice you is to ask its rival for help.