Appalachian Figures
On a ridge above the Pine Mountain valley in Harlan County, a stone house still looks west down the long hollow. Its terraces are dry laid from local rock, its chimney and foundation fitted so tightly that a century of rain has barely opened the seams. Local tradition remembers the place simply as Zande House, after the man who built it by hand.
For most visitors, Pine Mountain Settlement School calls to mind names such as William “Uncle William” Creech, Katherine Pettit, or Ethel de Long. Yet much of what people see when they walk the campus today is the work of another figure, an Italian immigrant stonemason named Luigi Zande. From the stone reservoir that helped save Laurel House during a devastating 1919 fire, to the hillside chapel and industrial buildings, his skill literally shaped the built environment of one of Appalachia’s most influential settlement schools.
This article traces Zande’s journey from a mountain town in northern Italy to the coal camps and schoolyards of Harlan County, and follows his legacy from the early coal era into the present.
From the Dolomites to Lynch, Kentucky
Pine Mountain’s archivists, drawing on genealogical records, place Luigi Zande’s birth on 11 March 1887 in Auronzo di Cadore, a lake town in the Dolomite mountains of northern Italy. He arrived in the United States in the early 1900s under the name Luigi Zandegiacomo, a surname common in his home village. Because several men with that name immigrated in those years, the exact passenger list that belongs to “our” Luigi remains uncertain.
By the 1910s he was in eastern Kentucky, almost certainly as one of the Italian stonemasons recruited by U.S. Coal and Coke, a U.S. Steel subsidiary, to help build its model company town at Lynch in Harlan County. Historian Betty Parker Duff’s graduate work and later recollections by Pine Mountain director Glyn Morris both suggest that Zande first worked at Lynch on coke oven and tipple foundations, where his craft caught the eye of settlement school leaders across the mountain.
Morris later described him as “a gifted stonemason working at Lynch, a U.S. Steel mining town across the mountain” who was persuaded to come to Pine Mountain when the young school needed a reservoir and new buildings.
Coming to Pine Mountain Settlement School
Pine Mountain Settlement School opened in 1913 on land donated by Harlan County farmer and justice of the peace William Creech. The school’s founders, Katherine Pettit and Ethel de Long, envisioned a residential school that would blend academic instruction with practical training on a working farm, in workshops, and through health outreach. Early letters and circulars by Ethel, such as her 1914 “Dear Friend” fundraising letter and the 1917 article “The Pine Mountain School: A Sketch from the Kentucky Mountains,” stress the need for durable buildings, workshops, and water systems that would serve both students and surrounding communities.
Zande appears at Pine Mountain by about 1914. Former student Bill Dawn, writing in a 1979 alumni homecoming report, remembered hearing how staff first “found” him at Lynch, employed on the new coke ovens. The school needed a reservoir, so they hired the Italian mason for what everyone thought would be a short job. Dawn recalled Zande as a “big, handsome, blond, blue eyed Italian” who spoke broken English but quickly became part of campus life. One job turned into many. In Dawn’s list, Zande built the water supply, the electric light system, the Chapel, and overhauled the sawmill, all while teaching boys’ industrial classes and cooking memorable meals.
Contemporary staff saw the same versatility. In a 1915 letter home, teacher Marguerite Butler called him “our Italian man of all trades,” noting that although he had been hired as a stonemason he now did “everything from building houses to cleaning chimneys and mending shoes.”
By his own account, in a 1928 letter to Buffalo industrialist and Pine Mountain board member Darwin D. Martin, Zande summed up his work as supervising woodworking classes, general repair and upkeep, and the various pieces of machinery around campus.
Building a Mountain Campus in Stone
Reservoir, Fire, and the Burden of Infrastructure
One of Zande’s earliest and most important projects at Pine Mountain was a stone reservoir and gravity fed water system that piped spring water down to the school buildings. That system proved critical during the night of 23 January 1919, when the Mary Sinclair Burkham School building caught fire.
In the inaugural issue of the school’s printed circular Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School, staff described how workers and students used the reservoir and water works, completed the previous summer, to save nearby Laurel House from burning as well. Without that system, they wrote, the fire “would have taken” Laurel House with the school.
Later National Historic Landmark documentation for Pine Mountain credits Zande with constructing that stone reservoir, still in use into the late twentieth century, and with teaching masonry to local residents and students.
Chapel, Workshops, and “Zande Boys”
Architect Mary Rockwell Hook drew up plans for many of Pine Mountain’s early buildings, but archival records repeatedly pair her name with Luigi Zande as architect and builder. National Park Service records and the architectural survey SAH Archipedia both credit Hook for the campus master plan and design, and Zande for the stone construction of core structures, including the chapel, terraces, and retaining walls that knit the buildings into the steep hillside.
At the same time, Zande was not simply a contractor. He taught industrial arts and masonry to squads of boys whose labor built much of the campus under his supervision. A 1927 issue of Notes describes how “Mr. Zande’s boys” laid tile in a long ditch, finished rooms in the Model Home loft, and built an addition to the infirmary so that the school could have a receiving room and treatment office, along with a small “pole house” for the dairy and poultry worker.
Dawn’s memoir makes clear that being one of these “Zande boys” carried a sense of pride. Instead of farm duty, they worked in the industrial building, built furniture for school dorms, and even made coffins for community members. Zande personally taught Dawn woodcarving, a skill the student later used to earn extra money at Berea College.
Director Katherine Pettit’s farewell letter to Zande in June 1928 offers a contemporaneous assessment of the scale of his work. She marveled that he had completed sixteen buildings “by untrained student labor,” praising his willingness to “stick to the job” year after year and leaving the school “so well equipped and everything in such fine shape” when he departed.
Zande House and a Hillside Home
If the reservoir and chapel were Zande’s most public creations, his most intimate project was the family home built on a steep hill above the chapel in 1917. Known ever since as Zande House, the building blends stone, wood shingles, and irregular massing in a way that mirrors the folds of the surrounding mountains.
Pine Mountain’s architectural files, drawing from Karen Hudson’s National Register work, describe Zande House as a one and a half story stone veneer and frame building whose irregular roofline, shed dormers, casement windows, and bracketed entry showcase some of the finest stonework on campus.
A later Pine Mountain Notes memorial to Ethel de Long offers a glimpse inside: the “little hillside house built by Mr. Zande” was “always sweet and orderly,” its stone terraces made with their own hands and its rooms filled with flowers she planted, a home “in which mutual love and happiness reigned.”
Marriage and Family
Zande was naturalized as a United States citizen in 1917. The following spring, on 10 April 1918, he married Pine Mountain co founder and co director Ethel de Long in Louisville. Their son Alberto (Berto) was born there on 19 March 1919. In 1922 they adopted an infant daughter, Elena, born that December in Missouri.
The Zande family was deeply woven into the social life of the school. In May 1918, staff member Evelyn K. Wells described the burial of Uncle William Creech, whose land donation had made Pine Mountain possible. She recalled watching Zande and fellow worker Andy Drosky toil over the grave and lay large stones by hand. Later Zande told friends he was glad to do this work for Creech, who had once paused to admire his stone tool house and asked him to build one like it someday.
Beyond architecture, the family helped sustain and interpret Appalachian music and craft traditions. A 1922 note in the mountain dulcimer literature cites “Mrs. Luigi Zande of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, Harlan County, Kentucky” as a source on how local players held and fretted the instrument, an example of how the Zandes served as intermediaries between outside researchers and community practice.
Loss, Departure, and a New Life in Asheville
Ethel de Long Zande’s health deteriorated in the late 1920s, and she died of cancer in 1928. Pine Mountain records show that on 23 May 1928, Luigi sold Zande House to the school for a nominal sum as a memorial to his wife, with the understanding that it would serve the school’s needs at the discretion of the Board.
Luigi left Pine Mountain at the end of June 1928. After a brief period in Wilmington, Delaware, he moved in October 1928 to the Asheville, North Carolina, area to work for the newly founded American Enka Company, a synthetic yarn producer. Pine Mountain’s biographical file notes that he continued to work there and in the Asheville region as a civil engineer and builder, applying the same skills he had honed on the Kentucky campus.
During this transition he maintained a correspondence with former Pine Mountain colleague Caroline Heinz, a secretary and housemother who had returned to Chicago. They married around 1930, and Alberto and Elena joined them in Asheville.
The Pine Mountain community did not forget him. In a 1953 letter, director Burton Rogers told Zande how pleased he was finally to meet him on a visit and reassured him that there would “always be a warm welcome” at the school, since so much of his work “still stands” and the staff was “daily thankful for it.”
Luigi Zande died on 13 December 1957 at age seventy. He is buried at Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, where his grave stone still bears his name and dates.
The Afterlife of Zande House and Chapel
After Luigi’s departure, Pine Mountain turned Zande House into staff housing. Director Glyn Morris and his wife lived there in the 1930s, followed by director H. R. S. Benjamin in the 1940s. In the 1950s it housed physicians connected with the school’s hospital work at West Wind, including Dr. Tracy and Florence Jones and their children.
Beginning in the mid twentieth century, Zande House also became the setting for the Dogwood Breakfast, an annual spring gathering where staff ate waffles on the west terrace framed by blooming dogwoods and looked down the valley. Angela Melville, who briefly directed the school after Ethel’s death, is credited with inviting colleagues to “come see my dogwoods” and starting the tradition.
In later decades the house served as the residence for Pine Mountain’s environmental education directors, notably Ben and Pat Begley, who added native plantings to the surrounding gardens. Today the building serves primarily as guest lodging for visitors, who sleep within the same stone walls set by Zande more than a hundred years ago.
The chapel and reservoir continue to anchor the campus. The Pine Mountain Settlement School as a whole was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991, with federal documentation naming Mary Rockwell Hook and Luigi Zande together as the team that realized the school’s distinctive stone and timber architecture.
Beyond Pine Mountain: Place Names and Memory
Hints of Zande’s presence appear even in Harlan County’s postal history. A study of local post offices by R. M. Rennick notes that the station at Laden, near the Pine Mountain campus, may briefly have been called “Zande” in the early twentieth century, suggesting that his name entered local geography at least informally.
Within the broader story of Appalachian reform, Zande stands at a crossroads. He was an immigrant craftsman whose skills were first tapped by an industrial coal company, then redirected into a progressive educational experiment. His stonework helped secure clean water, sturdy housing, and worship space for mountain children, even as he trained those same children in woodworking and masonry that might carry them beyond the narrow options of coal camp life.
Why Luigi Zande Matters
Pine Mountain Settlement School has always been more than its buildings, yet the place would look very different without Luigi Zande’s hands. The reservoir that kept Laurel House from burning in 1919, the chapel that still draws worshipers and tourists, and the hillside home whose terraces hold their line against erosion all speak to the presence of a craftsman who bridged continents and cultures.
Zande’s life also complicates the usual narratives about Appalachian history. He reminds us that Harlan County was never solely Scots Irish or Anglo American. Italian stoneworkers, northern women reformers, mountain farmers, and children from nearby coal camps all converged on the same ridges. Their collaborations and tensions produced both the beauty and the contradictions that define Pine Mountain.
For visitors walking the campus today, noticing the joints in the stonework or the way a terrace catches the light can be a way of remembering Luigi Zande, the immigrant mason whose work still shapes how Appalachia is seen, lived in, and told.
Sources & Further Reading
Pine Mountain Settlement School Archives, “Luigi Zande, Staff,” Series 09: Biography Staff. Includes biographical essay, images, extracts from Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School, letters by Marguerite Butler, Evelyn K. Wells, Katherine Pettit, Angela Melville, Darwin D. Martin, and Homecoming recollections by Bill Dawn. Pine Mountain Settlement School+1
Pine Mountain Settlement School Archives, “Zande House,” Series 10: Built Environment. Building history, National Register descriptions, inventories, and photographs. Pine Mountain Settlement School
Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School, Vol. 1 (February 1919) and later issues for 1927 and 1928. Descriptions of the Burkham fire and the role of the reservoir, industrial work by “Mr. Zande’s boys,” and memorial comments on the Zande home. Pine Mountain Settlement School+1
Evelyn K. Wells, “Record of Pine Mountain School,” 1913 to 1928. Especially sections on William Creech’s death and burial. Pine Mountain Settlement School+1
Ethel de Long, “The Pine Mountain School: A Sketch from the Kentucky Mountains,” Outlook, 21 February 1917. Reprinted in Pine Mountain Settlement School publications. Pine Mountain Settlement School
Ethel de Long Zande, “Dear Friend” circular letter, 14 November 1914, Pine Mountain Settlement School, reproduced by the Kentucky Historical Society. Pine Mountain Settlement School
National Park Service, Pine Mountain Settlement School National Historic Landmark nomination and registration form (1991), NPGallery Digital Asset 16000236. NPGallery
ExploreKYHistory, Kentucky Historical Society, Historical Marker 2387, “Pine Mountain Settlement School.” Explore Kentucky History+1
North Alabama Dulcimer Association, historical note citing “Mrs. Luigi Zande of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, Harlan County, Kentucky, Jan. 24, 1922” on dulcimer playing technique. North Alabama Dulcimer Association
“Luigi Zande,” Pine Mountain Settlement School online biography (compiled by Ann Angel Eberhardt and Helen Hayes Wykle with contributions from Michael L. Zande). Pine Mountain Settlement School
“Pine Mountain Settlement School,” SAH Archipedia, Society of Architectural Historians. SAH ARCHIPEDIA
“Luigi Zande,” Wikipedia entry, with references to Pine Mountain collections, genealogical data, and Asheville records. Appalachianhistorian.org
R. M. Rennick, “Harlan County Post Offices,” county study, Morehead State University regional history series. Morehead Digital Archives
Robert Yagley, genealogical compilation on the Zandegiacomo and Zande families, including vital records and immigration data. Robert Yagley
James S. Greene, “Progressives in the Kentucky Mountains: The Formative Years of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1913 to 1930,” Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University. ThinkIR
“Pine Mountain Settlement School,” institutional history and campus description, Pine Mountain Settlement School official website.