On August 23, 2011, a 5.8-magnitude earthquake emanating from central Virginia shook Washington, D.C., and much of the Mid-Atlantic region. Earthquakes are rare in the D.C. area, and this was a big one. My friends and family can all remember where they were when it happened. Just recently, it came up in my family’s group chat, and my brother recalled the way the framed photos on his bedroom wall swung as the ground moved.

I, however, missed the earthquake. I don’t remember where I was—probably somewhere near Grand Rapids on a road trip with friends. What I did get to see when I got home was the scaffolding going up around several of D.C.’s iconic buildings and monuments to repair the damage. The most notable damage was suffered by the Washington Monument and the Washington National Cathedral. The repairs to the Monument have been completed—it reopened to visitors in 2014—but the stone masons and carvers at the Cathedral are still hard at work repairing and restoring one of the capital city’s most iconic buildings.

As I learned about this summer’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival program, the work of these masons, as well as their counterparts in other traditional building trades such as plastering, restoration carpentry, blacksmithing, decorative painting, and more, piqued my interest. So many of them work on historic sites and historic buildings, and as a public history student, I immediately began thinking about the role they play in public history and historic preservation. Their crafts, passed down through generations, seemed to me to be not only a set of skills but a type of historical knowledge.

“This is traditional knowledge that’s centuries old,” explained Marjorie Hunt, the curator of this year’s Next Generation Artisans in the Traditional Building Trades program. Hunt has been studying the occupational culture of craftspeople in the building arts since 1978. “It’s been passed on from generation to generation, often through apprenticeship or through families or in other ways. It’s hands-on knowledge that’s learned experientially.”

Joe Alonso, head stone mason at the Cathedral, is well aware of the building’s unique historical and aesthetic footprint.

“I’ve been here forty years, and I’m still amazed by it,” he said. When he first came to the Cathedral in the 1980s, he had about seven years of masonry work under his belt and considered himself experienced. Laboring under former head stone mason Billy Cleland and master stone carver Vincent Palumbo, he quickly learned that it takes specialized skills to work on the Cathedral, which can only be learned through experience. “This place is so over the top with detail and workmanship. It’s different from any other job.”

The specific skills needed to care for the Cathedral have been passed down by the craftspeople who have worked on it since construction began on the massive fourteenth-century-Gothic-style building in 1907.

“Vince learned from Roger [Morigi], and Andy [Uhl] and Sean [Callahan] learned from Vince and now Bri is learning from them and me,” Alonso said.

Bri is Brianna Castelli, a journeyman mason and carver who joined the Cathedral staff in January 2024. She is likely the first traditionally trained female stone mason to work on the Cathedral—Alonso remembers a few women who apprenticed as stone carvers with Vincent Palumbo in the 1980s, but Castelli is the first who has come up through a union apprenticeship system.

“It’s always been a man’s world, you know?” Alonso said. “She survived four years of the Philly stone masons. Let me tell you, if you survived the Philly Union, that means you got what it takes.”

Castelli found masonry somewhat serendipitously. Having moved to Philadelphia after high school, she got a job in a coffee shop while she figured out what her next move in life should be. She had taken a few college-level art classes before the move, but continuing school felt far too expensive. At the coffee shop, she got to know a couple of regular customers who were stone masons and took an interest in their work.

“I’m from the West Coast, and we don’t have stone buildings there,” she said. “I just thought it was so cool.”

The customers told her about the stone masons’ union, and the concept of the four-year apprenticeship program, where beginners are trained on the job—and paid while they’re learning—was immensely appealing, as was working with her hands. While she was training, she reached out to Alonso with some questions about masonry. The two kept in touch, and when she finished her apprenticeship, he offered her a job at the Cathedral.

Castelli describes her day-to-day work as making stone repairs “like a little doctor.” She does both architectural repairs and intricate, artistic repairs, sometimes working down in the shop and other times up on the scaffolding. She is currently working on the north side of the Cathedral, where there’s a finial piece—a decorative element at the top of a roof or tower—with broken corners.

Both Alonso and Castelli constantly keep in mind that they are working to preserve a historic structure that is an important piece of Washington, D.C.’s built environment. With the tallest of its three towers reaching a height of 301 feet, the Cathedral is D.C.’s third-tallest building and the highest physical point in the District. It is a hub of social activity and community events and has served as the site for high-profile funerals, memorial services, inaugural prayer services, and vigils. It is important to the masons and carvers to preserve the site by maintaining the work of the craftspeople who came before them, using the traditional techniques that have been used for generations.

“We’re replacing and repairing works of art and craft that someone else did a hundred years before us—and we have to replicate it,” Alonso said. “It’s restoration work. We’re not creating a lot around here. Brianna’s not up there, like, ‘I’m gonna create a gargoyle today.’ All the gargoyles are in place. The Cathedral has been completed, and we are restoring.”

Castelli likes how the learning of her trade can be traced back through people. When a more experienced mason shows her different techniques, she knows they’re passing along knowledge that they picked up from previous masons.

“You’re working on parts of the building that were built a hundred years ago, ninety years ago, and you think of the multiple generations of masons and stone carvers and artists who have worked on this building,” she said.

Welcoming new people into the trade has become essential for keeping the skills and knowledge of traditional masonry and stone carving alive, and with them, the historic structures that require those skills and knowledge to be maintained. Alonso has seen changes over the years in the types of people involved in the work, and he is grateful to see younger generations taking up the trade, whether it’s young women like Castelli or immigrants from Central America.

“They’re fantastic and hardworking guys, and God bless them for wanting to do this,” he said. “They’re in the construction trades a lot now, and without them, we’d be in big trouble.”

This dedication to historic preservation through passing traditional building trades down to younger generations is echoed at nearby George Washington’s Mount Vernon, the sprawling plantation of the first U.S. president on the banks of the Potomac River, about fifteen miles south of D.C. Construction on the current mansion began around 1734, and George Washington began residing there in 1754. Today, Mount Vernon consists of 500 acres and over thirty buildings. The popular historic site hosts preservation carpentry and masonry interns from the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) each summer.

But this wasn’t always the case. When Thomas Reinhart began working as Mount Vernon’s director of preservation in 2013, interns were more focused on historical research projects.

“They weren’t working with their hands,” Reinhart said. “They weren’t working with tools. So we tried to start to get that to be more tool focused. We had projects where the interns were going through the Washington papers and looking for building materials, types of tools that were being ordered and used. And so we were trying to get that documentary record together.”

While that historical research was valuable, Reinhart envisioned another type of learning opportunity. With his background in architectural history and material culture, he has a keen understanding of the skills and partnerships required to steward a site like Mount Vernon, from maintaining the aging buildings to preserving the pristine view across the river into Maryland. He reworked the internship program to focus on hands-on, experiential learning, creating a space for young people to learn from highly experienced tradespeople on the job. These interns go through the same onboarding as employees: they go on all the tours and get an in-depth understanding of the site’s history and evolution. Then they become part of the preservation team. Last year, the carpentry intern worked on restoring and repairing the 1762 smokehouse right alongside the Mount Vernon carpenters.

“They get thrown in the deep end right away,” Reinhart said. “Ask whatever questions you want. You’ll get all the answers and training you want, but we expect that you’re gonna actually be doing this as a job, because that’s really what gets you the training, right? It’s not being put aside and given a little project—it’s actually being part of the team and knowing what the philosophy and the procedures and the responsibilities and the expectations of being a professional in a preservation trades setting. That’s what you really want to get out of an internship.”

These internships, he emphasized, are different from those intended for students going into history or museum studies. “There certainly is a deep dive into the history of Mount Vernon and Washington and the enslaved community here, but we’re not asking them to do research on it. We’re asking them to care for the buildings that that enslaved community built, right? To care for their legacy on this landscape.”

The internships fit perfectly with Mount Vernon’s mission of education. The site has a professional development program that offers scholarships to teachers to visit and learn about American history and George Washington, as well as a K–12 education program. Before the pandemic, they had 1.1 million visitors a year, and Reinhart expects they’ll reach that again for the semiquincentennial next year. The majority of visitors are students on school trips.

But the historical site’s educational mission goes beyond the first U.S. president. Mount Vernon, Reinhart explained, is more than an iconic history site—it’s also the birthplace of historic preservation in the United States.

Preservation efforts have been ongoing at the site since 1858, giving Reinhart and his colleagues a valuable perspective. They can see what was done to the buildings in previous decades and determine which techniques were successful and which were not. These observations have instilled in Reinhart the importance of traditional building trades: in the past, preservationists tried using synthetic materials, which, over time, did not work as well as the traditional methods.

“These buildings are made out of organic materials. They’re organic systems,” Reinhart explained. “They are a system which has been developed over thousands of years by tradespeople going all the way back into time, right out of memory, and what I have found is that using the traditional materials that were used in the past, you get a far better result.”

At the same time, he said, they’re not trying to “fool the preservationists in the future.” In all of their work, they try to preserve as much original material as possible. Sometimes that means, for example, using a modern bracket for support instead of carving away old timber. Anything visible to the public is treated in the same way it would have been treated in the eighteenth century. If it’s not visible, they might use a mix of traditional techniques and modern hand tools to ensure the building is safely maintained.

This means that preservation carpenters at Mount Vernon must be comfortable with a wide array of work, and one of the goals of the internships is to familiarize the students with the variety of skills and techniques they might use in their careers. Some ACBA students come to them, for example, as timber framing students, who have thus far in their careers focused on learning to build timber frames from scratch—a totally different emphasis than the conserving, repairing, and restoring work that they’ll do at Mount Vernon. Even as traditional building arts students, this work can open their eyes to the possibilities of working in historic preservation and the ways their trade can contribute to public history.

“We have always focused on material culture,” Reinhart said. “We have always focused on caring for and stewarding the built environment that Washington oversaw and had constructed through a combination of free white, free Black, and enslaved Black labor in the eighteenth century. So it has always been a place where we are trying to innovate and come up with new ways to lead the preservation community.”

A big part of this leadership is mentoring the young people who will carry on these building traditions and hopefully pass them along to yet another generation.

“In some ways, it’s a very selfish thing on my part to want to train these young craftspeople so that we have people in the future to continue what I’m doing today, right?” Reinhart said. “I value our historic structures, and I don’t want to see them go away when my generation goes. So it’s really hand-in-hand education and stewardship.”

“There is this desire to raise awareness of the important role of master craftspeople in  preserving our built environment,” Hunt said of the inspiration behind highlighting young people in the traditional building trades at this year’s youth-centric Folklife Festival. “You can’t preserve our past, embodied in these structures, if you don’t preserve the skill and knowledge of the people who do the work. Today, many of these trades are endangered because there are not enough young people coming up in the crafts. Pathways to learning the building arts are difficult to discover.”

Both of Mount Vernon’s carpentry interns this summer will be participating in the Festival, along with many members of the preservation carpentry crew. To Reinhart, it’s an experience that will fit well with their onsite training. While on the job, interns are encouraged to interact with the public, and Reinhart hopes they will take advantage of the chance to be “frontline interpreters” at the Festival—though there will always be someone more experienced there to help guide the conversation.

“The public never hesitates to ask our staff, including our interns, questions,” he said. “If you’re an intern, you might not have all the specific answers, but what they get to see is the way our staff answers questions about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it and why. I want them to be able to talk about their experiences, their life experiences, why they ended up taking the path that they took. Hopefully they will be able to see that they’re inspiring the next generation, beyond them, to perhaps follow that same path.”

Even though Mount Vernon is already a well-known historical site, Reinhart is looking forward to the opportunity that comes with being on the National Mall for the Festival.

“It will give us an opportunity to model more broadly to the American public what we do, how we do it, why we do it, and why it’s important as a nation that we preserve and care for these tangible remains of those who went before us—the ones who, yes, wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and all that, but also the people that stayed back home on the plantations and allowed those people to achieve what they achieved. Washington, Jefferson, Madison—they wouldn’t have gotten where they did if they hadn’t had skilled enslaved carpenters and painters and brick layers, agriculturalists. They made this country. They were the engine of this country, and it allowed those privileged ones to achieve what they achieved and provide for us as a nation the framework which we still adhere to today.”

The ACBA, which Reinhart partners with for his internships, will also be at the Festival, along with six other organizations that are dedicated to getting young people involved in the traditional building arts—including, of course, the Washington National Cathedral.

This summer won’t be Alonso’s first time representing the Cathedral at the Festival. In 2001, he was part of the Masters of the Building Arts program that highlighted the work of artisans in many of the same trades that will be featured this year. Still, he’s excited to return, this time with Castelli, Callahan, and Uhl, as well as stone carvers and letterers Nicholas Benson and his daughter, Hope Benson.

“We’ll be literally bringing our shop to the Mall. We will be bringing stones that we’re working on,” Alonso said. “It’ll just be fun to share that with people. It’s such a cool event.”

“I’m super stoked to do it,” Castelli said. “I feel like a lot of the time when we explain our job, sometimes it’s hard for people to understand what exactly a stone mason is. I want little kids to play with fixing stones. I just think that’ll be so much fun. It’ll be totally hands on.”

Hunt understands that for people who want to work with their hands, it can be difficult to discover the pathways available for pursuing the trades as a career. She hopes the Festival program will both inspire young people and inform them about the training programs and other avenues available for learning these skills that are essential to public history and historic preservation.

“It’s something you can’t learn out of a book, so it’s really important that there can be this connection between the experienced craftspeople and young people learning,” she said.

Alonso sees the final stretch of earthquake repairs—which will include repairing the top of the skyscraping central tower—on the Cathedral as his “magnum opus.” Figuring out the logistics and strategy for the repairs is a lot of work before the masons even pick up a hammer or chisel. But the repairs have also given them access to parts of the building they would have never been on otherwise, which has led to unique opportunities to contribute to the building. Recently, they were on the Cathedral’s roof and discovered a small, uncarved block.

“I haven’t touched it yet, but Joe said that I could put a little creation up there one day,” Castelli said. “That’s pretty crazy, because we normally don’t add new things to the building. It’s all re-creation and preserving. But someone forgot way back then to decorate it.”

For Alonso, who plans to retire when the tower repairs are completed in a few years, it’s all part of passing along the trade.

“When you’re on a building like this, it’s handed over to you from the previous generation,” he said. “It’s like, okay, here you go. It’s now yours for the next twenty or thirty, or in my case forty years. And now here we are. And eventually we’ll say, ‘Here you go, Bri.’”

For her part, Castelli is already thinking about the history intertwined with her work every day.

“I’m constantly thinking, how can I keep the integrity of the original in my work?” she said. “It’s not me. You know what I mean? It’s keeping the work of the person before me alive.”

See craftspeople from the Washington National Cathedral and George Washington’s Mount Vernon in action at the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which takes place July 2–7 in Washington, D.C.

Rebecca L. West is a digital public history intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a graduate student at George Mason University.