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A West Virginia Town Applied For Soviet Foreign Aid, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan February 21, 2020 33 min

Vulcan - McDowell County — Vulcan miners in 1919. The Sangha Kommune

36. Vulcan Gets Its Bridge

Vulcan’s request for Soviet foreign aid became national and international news. Bridge Hunter

On December 17^th, 1977, the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, dispatched a senior journalist to meet Vulcan’s mayor and survey the problem. He was authorized to promise the locals that his government would keep an eye on the situation, and that if their own government did not build them a bridge soon, the Soviets would foot the bill for building one.

Within an hour of that visit, word filtered down to reporters milling about Vulcan that West Virginia’s government had agreed to build a bridge. The state legislature authorized $1.3 million for the task. Today, a one-lane graffiti-covered bridge connects the people of Vulcan to the outside world.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.