In the fading photograph from 1893, dozens of men stand on wooden scaffolding, faces hardened by sun, hands rough with labor. Behind them rises the skeleton of what would become Biltmore Estate, the largest private home ever built in America—250 rooms, 178,000 square feet, a monument to wealth so vast it seems almost fictional. Look closer at those faces. More than half of them are Black.

Not servants, not decorators brought in after the fact, but builders: the men who cut the stone, mixed the mortar, shaped the wood, and carried limestone blocks weighing hundreds of pounds up temporary railways and makeshift ramps. A letter from estate management in 1893 confirms what the photographs suggest—there were more African American employees than white workers building that castle in the North Carolina mountains. Their names are lost to history. Their wages were a fraction of what white craftsmen earned.

Their legacy is written in every marble column and carved doorway of the grandest home America has ever known. This story begins long before the marble mansions and million-dollar fortunes. In the 1700s, while slavery cast its shadow across the South, African and African American men were building America—literally. They were blacksmiths, carpenters, stonemasons, and bricklayers.

They possessed skills brought from Africa, combined with techniques learned in the Americas, creating a tradition of craftsmanship that would shape the bones of the country. In Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, and Richmond, Black craftsmen built the churches, mansions, and public buildings that white society took credit for. Colonial newspaper advertisements tell the story if you know where to look: notices seeking skilled enslaved workers—carpenters who could fashion intricate wood panels, masons who could lay brick in patterns that would last centuries, blacksmiths who could forge everything from nails to ornamental gates. One advertisement from 1733 in Charleston describes Peter, a man skilled in bricklaying, plastering, and whitewashing.

Another mentions Samson, known throughout the region for his painting and glazing. These were not unskilled laborers. They were artists whose work is still visible in the antebellum architecture of the South, even if their names have been erased from plaques and tour guides. That knowledge did not disappear when the Civil War ended.

It evolved. After emancipation, those skills became pathways to real freedom—economic freedom, the freedom to build a life on one’s own terms. In cities across the South, formerly enslaved craftsmen opened their own shops. A man who had worked in stables during slavery opened his own business in Charleston after the war.

Richard Holloway Jr. continued his family’s carpentry business that had operated even before emancipation. By the time the Gilded Age arrived in the 1870s, bringing an explosion of wealth and construction unlike anything America had seen, Black craftsmen were not just ready—they were essential. The Gilded Age, from 1870 to 1900, was a time when American industrial titans made fortunes so large they would dwarf most modern billionaires.

Power meant building monuments to yourself. Newport, Rhode Island, the summer playground of America’s richest families, saw mansion after mansion rise along Bellevue Avenue. They were called cottages, which is almost funny considering some had seventy rooms. The Breakers, built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II between 1893 and 1895, set the standard for excess: seventy rooms, Italian Renaissance architecture, marble imported from Italy, alabaster from Africa.

Two thousand workers labored in shifts day and night to complete it in just two years. When the sun set, gas lamps were lit and the hammering continued. The historical record is frustratingly incomplete about who those workers were, but the Preservation Society of Newport County, which now maintains these mansions, has found evidence of a diverse workforce that included significant numbers of Black employees—not just in servant roles, but in construction and skilled trades. The pattern repeats across the Gilded Age landscape.

When Henry Morrison Flagler built the Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida in 1894, he brought workers from the Bahamas—Black workers who lived in a segregated camp without running water or electricity, a camp they called the Sticks, named after the river of the underworld. While wealthy guests arrived in private railroad cars, these workers laid the foundation and raised the walls. Nowhere is the story clearer than at Biltmore. George Washington Vanderbilt II wanted something extraordinary, and he hired Richard Morris Hunt, one of America’s most celebrated architects, who had trained in Paris.

Hunt designed a chateau inspired by French Renaissance architecture. To build it, they needed an army. A temporary three-mile railroad spur was constructed just to bring materials from Biltmore Village to the construction site. Every morning and evening, that train carried about one thousand laborers and sixty stonemasons—carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, and plasterers who would work for six years to complete the dream.

According to estate management letters from 1893, the majority of those workers were African American. This was not a token workforce. This was the backbone of construction. The work was brutal.

Limestone blocks had to be hand-cranked and gear-hoisted into place. There were no modern cranes, no hydraulic lifts, just human strength and ingenuity. The on-site brick kiln produced thirty-two thousand bricks a day, and every one of those bricks had to be made, moved, and mortared into place by hand. Payroll records that survive reveal segregated crews.

Black workers and white workers might work on the same structure, but not together. They worked separately, ate separately, and were paid differently. A Black carpenter might do the same work as a white carpenter but receive a fraction of the wages. A white carpenter at Biltmore might earn two dollars a day; a Black carpenter doing identical work might earn one dollar or less.

Half pay for the same skill, the same hours, the same backbreaking labor. Yet they came. They worked. Because even with the discrimination and segregation, these jobs represented opportunity—steady work in an era when economic security was never guaranteed, a chance to use skills passed down through generations, a chance to feed families and build communities.

And build communities they did. While Black workers constructed mansions for white millionaires, they were also building something else: their own spaces of dignity and achievement. Newport, long before the Gilded Age millionaires arrived, had another distinction. In 1780, the Free African Union Society was founded there—the first benevolent society for African Americans in the entire country.

It was a mutual aid organization that provided financial support, recorded births and marriages, and helped Black families build stable lives. By the Gilded Age, Newport had a thriving Black community of business owners, doctors, and teachers. Mary Dickerson, a dressmaker, saw wealthy families arriving for the summer season and knew they would need someone to make and repair their elaborate clothing. She built a business so successful she eventually owned seven properties.

This pattern repeated across America. In Washington, D. C. , the capital attracted Black families from across the nation because it offered something rare: jobs that matched education levels and a community that valued achievement.

By 1900, the Black population reached seventy-five thousand. Within that population was the “Black 400,” fewer than one hundred families who formed an elite based on education, profession, and respectability. These families were not millionaires—the wealthiest Black man in Baltimore in 1890 had about seventy-five thousand dollars—but they were building something that mattered: schools, churches, newspapers, and social clubs that would support and sustain Black communities for generations. In Charleston, the tradition of Black craftsmanship ran so deep that even as late as 1880, three-quarters of all skilled Black workers were concentrated in just ten occupations: carpenter, brickmason, tailor, baker, cooper, blacksmith, shoemaker, painter, barber, and butcher.

These jobs paid less than positions typically held by whites, but they represented autonomy—the ability to control your own economic destiny. Philip Simmons, born in 1912, learned blacksmithing from Peter Simmons, who had learned the trade from his father, Guy. Guy had been enslaved and worked as a blacksmith during slavery. After emancipation, he inherited his father’s shop and passed that knowledge to his son, who passed it to Philip—three generations, one unbroken line of craftsmanship.

Philip would go on to create some of Charleston’s most beautiful ornamental ironwork, work that tourists photograph today without knowing the story behind it. These success stories existed against a backdrop of crushing discrimination and violence. Henry Boyd, born enslaved in Kentucky in 1802, learned carpentry and earned enough money to purchase his freedom. In 1826, he moved to Cincinnati.

By 1835, he had saved enough to buy freedom for his entire family and had over three thousand dollars. He invented a corded bed, a forerunner of modern bed frames, and opened a factory that employed six workers—five of them white. A formerly enslaved Black man employing white workers in 1839, running a successful manufacturing business. But the same year he opened his factory, racist mobs burned it down—twice.

He rebuilt both times. Jim Crow laws were tightening across the South. Lynching was an ever-present threat. The gains of Reconstruction were being systematically dismantled.

But even in the face of terror, Black craftsmen kept working, kept creating, kept passing down skills and knowledge because they understood something fundamental: you can burn down a building, but you cannot steal skill. You cannot take away knowledge, and you cannot destroy the determination to build something better for the next generation. The architect might design the building, but the craftsmen solve the problems that arise every day on a major construction site. How do you move a limestone block weighing several hundred pounds up a mountain when there are no modern roads?

You build a temporary railroad. How do you ensure stone walls will support five stories? You rely on master stonemasons who understand stress and weight distribution through decades of experience. Those sixty stonemasons at Biltmore were the aristocrats of the labor force.

Many came from families where the craft had been passed down for generations—Black families who had been shaping stone since before the Revolution. To build a structure like Biltmore, you need to understand geometry, angles, load-bearing calculations, water drainage, thermal expansion. Black craftsmen possessed that education, whether formal or practical. They knew their trade deeply and intimately.

When the workday ended, the workers went home to communities they were building themselves. In Asheville, a Black community was taking shape. Workers who had come for construction jobs stayed, started businesses, and bought property. The Young Men’s Institute, a cultural center for Black residents, opened in 1893, the same year Biltmore’s main construction was underway.

Every major Gilded Age construction site became a catalyst for Black community development. In cities across America, Black families were purchasing homes and businesses despite facing discrimination from banks, real estate agents, and white neighbors. They founded schools, sponsored scholarships, supported churches and civic organizations, and created networks of mutual aid that helped Black families survive economic hardship. Historically Black colleges and universities played a vital role.

Howard University in Washington, Fisk in Nashville, Atlanta University, Spelman, Tuskegee—these institutions provided education when white universities barred Black students. They trained the teachers who would educate the next generation, the doctors who would serve Black communities, and the lawyers who would fight for civil rights. Graduates fanned out across the South and North, becoming the professional class that would lead Black communities through the trials of the twentieth century. Today, when you visit Biltmore Estate, tour guides will tell you about George Vanderbilt’s vision and Richard Morris Hunt’s architectural genius.

But you will hear almost nothing about the one thousand workers, the majority of them Black, who turned that vision into reality. When you walk through the Breakers in Newport, you will learn about Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad fortune and the two thousand workers who labored day and night. But the names of those workers are silent, absent from the official narrative. That is finally changing.

The Preservation Society of Newport County has begun telling these stories, developing tours that focus not on the Vanderbilts and Astors but on the servants and workers who made those lifestyles possible. Biltmore Estate now acknowledges on its official website the role of Black workers in construction. That 1893 letter confirming more African American employees than white is publicly available. Researchers can access payroll records that show the segregation of crews and the different wage scales.

The Gilded Age was built on inequality, on exploitation, on the labor of people who were never meant to share in the wealth they created. But it was also built on skill, on artistry, on the human capacity to create beauty even in unjust circumstances. Both things are true. The mansions are magnificent, and they were built through exploitation.

The architecture is remarkable, and it came at a human cost. Their names may be lost, but their legacy is written in limestone and marble, in carved oak and ornamental iron, in every grand entrance and sweeping staircase of America’s Gilded Age. And in building those palaces, they built something else: communities of resilience, traditions of craftsmanship, and pathways to freedom that continue today.