Any householder knows how essential for keeping your dwelling in good shape are artisans/craftsmen/tradesmen of various kinds -- carpenters, plumbers, painters, electricians, landscape designers and the like.

That's why Jean and I decided to celebrate the 100th birthday of our Highland Park house with a party for the craftsmen who have helped maintain and enhance it during our 36 years here. Included also was architect Fred Schmitt, who designed a cathedral room out of bedrooms on the second and third floors. George Dakis, who did the remodeling work itself, was gone to Europe.

We were able to share with our guests a history of the house that was researched and written by historian Carol Peterson of Lawrenceville. Built in 1907 by William O. Wright and first owned by George S. Daugherty, a wholesale grocer, it has had five homeowner families, including ours. Ms. Peterson said that our street was named for James Dawson Callery, a transit entrepreneur instrumental in developing Highland Park as a middle-class "streetcar suburb" by laying lines on North Highland, North Negley and other streets in the 1890s.

Some of the resulting homes, including ours, were on display last weekend as part of the annual Highland Park House Tour.

In preparation for the gathering, I sought information about the history of residential craftsmen in Pittsburgh, including the stained-glass artisans and bricklayers whose work still glorifies homes of that period. To my surprise, I found very little, even among the invaluable resources of the Pennsylvania Room at the Carnegie Library. What material exists there relates to craftsmen who worked in the mills, found in labor-union material. But not residential tradesmen.

I turned to Prof. Charles McCollester of the Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Labor Relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, who furnished me with "Building Pittsburgh," a DVD he directed. It described the formation of the local plumbers' union in 1890, the carpenters' union in 1887 and the electricians' unions in 1897.

But for residential tradesmen, the record is scarcer, perhaps because most were nonunion. Barry Chad at the Pennsylvania Room suggested that this group might be the basis for a postgraduate thesis or dissertation, but wondered, "Where would they get the material?"

At our home gathering, I ventured that I had always heard that the Italians drifted into prominence in the trades, often after forsaking the mines and the mills that had attracted them to the Pittsburgh region in the first place. Under this theory, it was the Slavs who remained as the bulk of the workforce in the mills.

But guest Michael Sciarretti expressed the view that the earlier craftsmen were Germans, who, after the Scotch-Irish, were among the earliest immigrant groups in Pittsburgh. Their reputation for skilled work stood them in good stead until Italians with abilities in tile-setting, carpentry/woodcarving and landscaping came along. At various times, skilled craftsmen were specifically recruited from various countries in Europe, especially to work on large mansions.

But we all agreed that anything along these lines amounted to broad generalizations, with exceptions galore.

A clearer picture came a few days later when I had a helpful conversation with Paul A. Quarantillo, president and business manager of the Laborers' District Council of Western Pennsylvania. He says there has always been a debate as to whether it was the Irish or the Italians who first left the mines and coal patches of Blair, Cambria, Indiana and Westmoreland counties to be the independent plumbers and steamfitters in Pittsburgh's mills and in commercial life. The record is less clear for artisans in the residential sector, he said, because they were mostly nonunion and therefore didn't pass through union apprentice programs.

How do people get into the trades? Often it is through family ties.

An exception is Mr. Sciarretti, who could have gone with his family firm, the Sciarretti Asphalt Paving Company, but decided to branch out on his own, forming City Dwellings Restoration Company, LLC. In addition to restoring old houses, he does landscape designing, in our case starting with a pergola he suggested as a centerpiece of our back yard. His heritage from his family, he said, comes from learning business practices, rather than the trades themselves.

Also present at our craftsmen's gathering was Matt Smuts, responsible for reshaping our front yard, our earliest landscaping venture. Matt's father, the late Ed Smuts, was involved in developing Pittsburgh's greenways program. Matt now is beginning to participate in Pittsburgh's "green" emphasis in buildings and landscaping.

Family influence was important in the case of carpenter Doug Karoleski of Gibsonia. At our party, he described learning the trade from his father and grandfather while he was growing up in Dubois, with two comments on what he learned from them. They sum up why we've been fortunate in our artisans:

"You need to have the right tools to do the job right."

"It's the little things that count -- the finishing touches."