An Italian immigrant artist who helped shape the Mount Rushmore National Memorial lived most of his adult life in Westchester. Born in 1892, Luigi Del Bianco began wood carving as a boy in Meduno, Italy. As a youth, he studied stone carving and architecture. In 1910, at age 18, he immigrated to Vermont, where he worked in a quarry. In the early 1920s, he moved to Port Chester where he opened a monument carving studio.
After meeting Del Bianco through a mutual acquaintance, renowned Danish-American sculptor and engineer Gutzon Borglum—the designer of Mount Rushmore—took him under his wing. They collaborated to create the Stone Mountain Memorial 15 miles outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and the Wars of America Memorial in Newark, New Jersey.
In 1933, Del Bianco was hired as an assistant to help carve images of four iconic American presidents on Mount Rushmore. In 1935, Borglum promoted Del Bianco to replace Rushmore’s first chief carver, Hugo Villa, and put him in charge of all drilling and carving.
Del Bianco’s role was to add expressive details to the faces and eyes of the presidents. He also is credited with patching a crack in Jefferson’s lip. Del Bianco worked on the monument seasonally between 1935 and 1940. When his work was completed, he settled permanently in Port Chester, where he carved hundreds of headstones in his stone-cutting shop.
The contributions of this master carver, who died in 1969, might have slipped into obscurity. But his son, Caesar Del Bianco, and his grandson, Lou Del Bianco—both Port Chester residents—spent decades researching Luigi’s legacy. Among the documents unearthed are letters from Borglum praising Luigi: “He is worth any three men I could find in America for this type of work…He is the only man besides myself who…knows the problems and how to instantly solve them.”
Today, Lou Del Bianco’s book (Out of Rushmore’s Shadow: The Luigi Del Bianco Story), blog, a memorial plaque in Port Chester, and another at Mount Rushmore—plus a permanent exhibit of his work in the Italian American Museum in New York—preserve the inspiring story of this master craftsman.
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