20. A Weird Plan Makes a Tiny Community Famous
Vulcan, in Mingo County, West Virginia, is a small community on the state’s southwest border with Kentucky. In the 1970s, Vulcan had its fifteen minutes of fame, when it became known nationally and around the globe for a weird and riveting plan to get a bridge. Surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the Tug River on the fourth, Vulcan would probably never have been inhabited if coal had not been discovered there in the early twentieth century. A coal mining camp sprang up, and eventually gave rise to a small but thriving community. Thriving, that is until the coal ran out in the early 1960s.
Soon as the coal was gone, Vulcan’s population began shrinking, until it was reduced to a few dozen families – stubborn holdouts unwilling to leave the place they knew as home. To the extent that the outside world had ever taken notice of Vulcan, it forgot about it soon as the coal ran out. That was a problem for the locals, seeing how they were all but cut off from the rest of the world.