Interview with Hugo Janutolo, January 18, 1979

Interview Summary

Hugo Janutolo was born in Virginia in 1907. He moved to Italy with his family at the age of five or six and returned to the U.S. at the age of eighteen. He traveled as an apprentice bricklayer in Virginia, West Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky, and later lived in Hyden, where he worked as a stonemason. Janutolo recalls particular buildings being built in and around Hyden under the WPA while he was working for private contractors. According to Janutolo, most of the stonework done in Eastern Kentucky was done by Italian stonemasons. He goes into the details of various building procedures. Janutolo also worked as a coal miner at Wooton for ten years and mentions efforts to unionize the local mines in the late 1940s and 1950s. A coal company destroyed some land of Janutolo's with a strip- mining operation and made no compensation because the mineral rights had been sold before he acquired the land. Janutolo comments upon visits from the FNS nurses and his association with the FNS over the years.

Interview Keyword

Bricklayers Building, Stone Construction industry. Eastern Kentucky Minerals rights Owl's Nest (Ky.) Rural roads Stone-cutting Stonemasons United States. Works Progress Administration. Wooton (Ky.)

Interview LC Subject

Appalachian Region--Social life and customs Coal mines and mining--Kentucky Frontier Nursing Service, Inc. Hyden (Ky.) Leslie County (Ky.) Medical care--Appalachian Region Medicine, Rural Stonemasonry Traditional medicine

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Interview Usage

Interviews may be reproduced with permission from Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, Special Collections, University of Kentucky Libraries.