Elizabeth Hunter
Of the U.S. 421 bridge near Boone, North Carolina, Frank Troitino said the rockwork was too uniform, and was not a parkway “old job. . . . not the way they taught us."
Here’s a story I never knew, until I started working on this article. It’s gleaned from a 2003 interview conducted by Philip “Ted” Coyle, with Frank Troitino, a nephew of the Spanish stonemason Joe Troitino, who was involved in building 75 percent of Blue Ridge Parkway stonework built between 1935 and 1969, his nephew estimated, and much of it thereafter, until his death shortly after the parkway was completed in 1987.
Joe Troitino first came to the United States in 1914, at age 14; because he was too young to work, he faked his birth certificate. He and a friend returned to Spain briefly, and were barred from re-entry to the United States because the friend’s visa had expired. They went to Canada, where Joe’s U.S. visa also expired. When they tried to sneak into the country at Niagara Falls, they were arrested and jailed for six months before a Catholic priest was able to spring them. Thereafter, they worked in Vermont stone quarries and West Virginia coal mines, and as stonemasons, skills they had acquired in Spain. When they got word of a roadbuilding project through the mountains in Virginia and North Carolina, they applied for parkway stonemasonry jobs and got them. The friend died young, but Joe Troitino continued to do government contract work, not just on the parkway but in the Smokies and in Washington, D.C., into his 80s.
Frank Troitino, who also worked on the parkway as a stonemason, explained the fine points of early parkway stonemasonry to Coyle. Stone had to be quarried within 50 miles of where it would be used: that was a parkway requirement. Masons split the rock into blocks by hand to parkway specifications: blocks had to be a minimum of six inches tall and could be one and a half, two or three times as long as tall, but no “big, enormous rock” anywhere. The masons took particular care, too, he said, that joints were uniform.
By the time the double-span U.S. 421 bridge and its extensive retaining walls—all rock faced—were constructed, blocks were machine-cut, and, he thought, minimum block height had been reduced to four inches. For that much rock work, block dimensions should have been larger. The uniformity of the rock work makes it look “more or less like a fireplace, not a real Blue Ridge Parkway old job.” People like it, he said, but it’s “not what they taught us.”