When your boiler breaks, you call a plumber. Damaged staircase, you call a carpenter. But who do you call when a Category 4 hurricane rips the roof off of your 18th-Century historical buildings?

That was the problem faced by Charleston, South Carolina—the oldest city in that state—when Hurricane Hugo swept through it in 1989. Hugo "carried off nearly every roof in town, leaving homes and businesses to be flooded by torrential rain," writes Citylab. As water began pouring into now-roofless structures built hundreds of years ago, damage figures soared into the billions.

And as residents set about rebuilding, they soon realized they had another problem on their hands: a shortage of artisans trained in skills like masonry, ironwork, and plastering, necessary to repair the city's famous historic buildings.

These trades had traditionally been passed down by skilled craftsmen to their sons or apprentices, but that old system had long since been fading away. "It was a recognition that a generation of teachers had diminished," says Mayor Joe Riley, who has been in office since 1975.

Charleston would recover from Hugo, but city leaders, newly appreciative of high-quality craftsmanship, decided that something had to be done to prevent traditional building arts from disappearing for good.

Riley got together with local preservationists to form a trade school that could produce skilled artisans to wield those forgotten skills. Putting together any kind of school, let alone one like this, was no easy task, and it took the better part of twenty years. But in 2005 the American College of the Building Arts opened its doors. By 2009 they were finally minting diplomas and had graduated their first class.

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ACBA offers a four-year Bachelor in Applied Science degree in Building Arts, and it's the only school on the entire planet to do so. (They also offer a two-year Associate's degree.) All students technically have the same major—Building Arts—but within the program, choose to specialize in one of six areas: Architectural Stone, Carpentry, Forged Architectural Iron, Masonry, Plaster, and Timber Framing.

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What's even cooler is that they also include traditional liberal arts classes—math, English, science, history—into the curriculum, but connect those courses heavily to the building arts. For example, the math classes focus on problems you'd encounter in an actual shop environment; the English classes might have you preparing debates—about ironwork; the science classes give students a better understanding of materials and their properties; the history classes tie in with architectural history.

The internship program doesn't sound too shabby either, having "sent students abroad to work on castles and cathedrals."

As for what it's like to take the classes themselves, an article written by the National Trust for Historic Preservation provides this example:

Amid the clanging hammers and buzzing saws stood Bruno Sutter, a timber framing professor who was teaching the so-called trait de charpente system of using geometrical drawings to construct compound roof joints. The method, thought to have been invented by medieval monks, works well for preservation projects, Sutter explains, because beams in old buildings are rarely plumb.

It's one thing to fake your way through an English paper on Hamlet. It's quite another to fake your way through building a compound roof joint when your professor is Sutter, a steely-eyed Frenchman who trained in the renowned Compagnon system, a European carpenters' guild that dates to the Middle Ages. Says student Moyer Fountain, a senior specializing in timber framing, "The first week we were here, we had 8-by-8 timbers and a framing square. We hand-sawed for a week straight. Bruno just stood there and smiled. 'What the heck is he doing to us?' we thought."

The students soon realized that Sutter was starting with the basics. Before you can entertain grandiose visions of building a curved wood staircase, you need to learn how to work the material. Fail to split your pencil line in half when cutting a piece of wood? Do it again. Forget to carry a numeral when making calculations and end up with a shoulder that's too short? Do it again. "He broke it all down, then started building us up with training," says Fountain.

In other words, you're doing real, hands-on stuff, not swimming through pools of theory.

You can learn more about ACBA here.