The American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) in Charleston, South Carolina, integrates professional hands-on training in the traditional building trades with a liberal arts core curriculum. Its mission is to foster exceptional craftsmanship and encourage the preservation, enrichment, and understanding of the world’s architectural heritage. Craft specializations for students include architectural carpentry, blacksmithing, plastering, architectural stone carving, timber framing, and classical architecture and design.

At the Festival, stone carvers, architectural carpenters, architects, and historic preservation specialists from ACBA demonstrated their skills, shared their experiences teaching and learning the building arts, and discussed why hand craftsmanship matters to them.

Participants

The Campaign for Historic Trades is a dynamic workforce development initiative that works to expand and strengthen training and careers in the historic building trades. The campaign focuses on the skills needed to maintain, preserve, restore, and reconstruct historic structures in local communities. It seeks to develop statewide and national historic trades training opportunities, including partnering with the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center to promote and recruit for their Traditional Trades Advancement Program, which provides hands-on, historic preservation trade skills training to young people during an intensive twenty-week experience.

Staff members with The Campaign for Historic Trades provided Festival visitors with a wealth of information and guidance on training and career opportunities in the traditional building trades and historic preservation fields.

Participants

The Historic Preservation Training Center’s Traditional Trades Advancement Program (TTAP) is committed to providing aspiring young preservationists—especially those who are underrepresented in the preservation trades—with a unique opportunity to work on important, real-world projects and learn how to preserve historic cultural resources in the nation’s national parks. The program gives experienced National Park Service preservation craft professionals the opportunity to pass on their craft skills, ensuring national park histories continue to inspire and educate the next generation. “We do whatever we can to save these structures for future generations to enjoy and learn about the rich history of the United States,” one HPTC master craftsman said.

Expert craftspeople from the Historic Preservation Training Center in Frederick, Maryland, teamed up with TTAP interns and students from the Stephen T. Mather Building Arts & Craftsmanship High School in New York City to demonstrate traditional Appalachian-style log building, wood crafting, historic masonry, and wood color matching techniques.

Participants

In 2014, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched HOPE Crew (Hands-On Preservation Experience), its trades training initiative, with the goal of bringing the preservation trades to a younger, more diverse audience. HOPE Crew links preservation projects to local youth organizations and communities across the nation. It brings the potential for thousands of youth participants to restore hundreds of historic sites, while learning preservation trade skills from master craftspeople. Since its inception, HOPE Crew has engaged over 3,700 volunteers, trained over 900 paid participants, and worked at over 200 sites.

At the Festival, participants shared their teaching and learning experiences and guided visitors through hands-on preservation training opportunities and information about historic preservation careers.

Participants

John Canning & Co. is a highly regarded preservation and restoration studio specializing in architectural arts, including decorative finishes, gilding, ornamental plaster restoration, and historic woodwork. First established in the early 1970s by John Canning, who learned his trade serving a rigorous apprenticeship as a church decorator in Glasgow, Scotland, before immigrating to the United States, John Canning & Co. has been a family-run business for over forty-five years. A master of decorative painting and a dedicated teacher, Canning has passed his craft skills on to his daughter Jacqueline Canning Riccio, his son-in-law David Riccio, and his granddaughters, Isabella and Zoe Riccio. The talented artisans at John Canning & Co. have restored many of our country’s most important historic buildings, including Grand Central Terminal, the U.S. Capitol Building, Radio City Music Hall, and the National Building Museum.

Three generations of the Canning-Riccio family taught Festival visitors about their decorative painting tools and techniques.

Participants

George Washington’s Mount Vernon is committed to training the next generation of skilled artisans through its robust preservation trades internship program. Undergraduate students learn the philosophy and skills of preserving an historic eighteenth-century building through on-the-job experience, working side by side with master craftspeople, particularly in the areas of preservation carpentry, timber-frame construction, and heritage masonry.

Mount Vernon has embarked on a multiyear landmark preservation project from 2023 through 2026 to safeguard the mansion’s original building fabric, ensure its structural integrity, and preserve its important American story for generations to come. Skilled preservation artisans are playing a central role in this effort.

Participants

The New Orleans Master Crafts Guild seeks to revive the traditional building trades of New Orleans and provide apprenticeship training for new generations of master craftspeople to maintain and preserve the distinctive centuries-old architectural landscape of the city. Founding members Jonn Hankins, master plasterer Jeffrey Poree, and master blacksmith Darryl Reeves are dedicated to passing on their knowledge, skills, and cultural heritage to young people in New Orleans—“the kids in our community”—so that their treasured craft traditions can continue. “I love to see these young people get on in the craft. We want to keep the tradition alive,” says fifth-generation plasterer Poree.

At the Festival, Darryl Reeves and Jeff Poree joined with guild apprentices Karina Roca and Wilfred Holmes to demonstrate their blacksmithing and plastering skills while sharing their thoughts on why teaching and learning the traditional trades is important to them.

Participants

Washington National Cathedral, a magnificent fourteenth-century-Gothic-style cathedral in Washington, D.C., was severely damaged when a rare 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck the mid-Atlantic region in 2011. Since then, highly skilled craftspeople have worked tirelessly to restore the cathedral’s damaged stonework—its elaborately crafted pinnacles, gargoyles, crockets, and flying buttress—and to reinforce and protect the nearly 120-year-old national treasure against future damage.

Head stone mason Joe Alonso and master stone carvers Sean Callahan and Andy Uhl bring more than forty years of experience crafting and restoring the cathedral’s monumental stonework. At the Festival, they, and newly hired journeyman stone carver and mason Brianna Castelli, demonstrated their techniques for restoring damaged pinnacle stones, discussed the on-the-job training in preservation craftsmanship that takes place at the cathedral, and shared information about learning opportunities for young people interested in stone carving and heritage masonry. Master stone carver and letterer Nicholas Benson and his daughter Hope Benson demonstrated their skills creating beautiful inscriptional work.

Participants