The carpenter who is known must have a name if it was recorded. I say this "known" carpenter is an assertion made by people who refuse to believe anything from heaven can come to earth.
The Mysterious Staircase (Analysis)
The subject of rumor and legend for over a hundred years, the riddle of the carpenter's identity was finally solved in the late 1990s by Mary Jean Straw Cook, author of Loretto: The Sisters and Their Santa Fe Chapel (2002: Museum of New Mexico Press). His name was Francois-Jean "Frenchy" Rochas, an expert woodworker who emigrated from France in 1880 and arrived in Santa Fe right around the time the staircase was built. In addition to evidence that linked Rochas to another French contractor who worked on the chapel, Cook found an 1895 death notice in The New Mexican explicitly naming Rochas as the builder of "the handsome staircase in the Loretto chapel."
This demonstrates among other things that the carpenter's identity was not a mystery to residents of Santa Fe at the time. At some point, presumably after the last remaining members of the generation of Santa Feans who witnessed the building of the Loretto Chapel firsthand passed away, Rocha's contribution to the Loretto Chapel faded from memory, and history gave way to legend.
snopes.com: Mysterious Staircase at Loretto Chapel
For starters, the Loretto staircase was apparently not all that fine a piece of work from a safety standpoint. It was originally built without a railing, presenting a steep descent that reportedly so frightened some of the nuns that they came down the stairway on their hands and knees. Not until several years later did another artisan (Phillip August Hesch) finally add a railing to the staircase. Moreover, the helix shape acted like what it resembles, a big spring, with many visitors reporting that the stairs moved up and down as they trod them. The structure has been closed to public access for several decades now, with various reasons (including a lack of suitable fire exits and "preservation") given for the closure at different times, leading investigator Joe Nickell to note that "There is reason to suspect that the staircase may be more unstable and, potentially, unsafe than some realize."
Although the Loretto legend maintains that "engineers and scientists say that they cannot understand how this staircase can balance without any central support" and that by all rights it should have long since collapsed into a pile of rubble, none of that is the case. Wood technologist Forrest N. Easley noted (as reported by the
Skeptical Inquirer) that "the staircase does have a central support," an inner wood stringer of such small radius that it "functions as an almost solid pole." As well, Nickell observed when he visited Loretto in 1993 that the structure includes an additional support, "an iron brace or bracket that stabilizes the staircase by rigidly connecting the outer stringer to one of the columns that support the loft." Nickell concluded: "It would thus appear that the Loretto staircase is subject to the laws of physics like any other."
As for the wood used in the stairway's construction, it has been identified as spruce, but not a large enough sample has been made available for wood analysts to determine which of the ten spruce species found in North America (and thus precisely where) it came from. That the structure may have built without the use of glue or nails is hardly remarkable — nails were often an unavailable or precious commodity to builders of earlier eras, who developed a number of techniques for fastening wood without them.
All in all, nothing about Loretto's design or manufacture evidences any sign of the miraculous. The staircase (and the chapel that houses it) is, however, now part of a privately-owned museum operated for profit, a situation that provides its owners with a strong financial motive for promulgating the legend.
The wood was from a species found only in the middle east. Don't you think it strange that a "known" carpenter would ship the raw lumber that far just for a staircase?
According to the above article it seems to have been mis-identified previously
Also
CSI | Helix to Heaven
The other mysteries that are emphasized in relation to the stair are the identity of the carpenter and the type of wood used. It seems merely mystery mongering to suggest that there is anything strange least of all evidence of the supernatural in the failure to record the name of an obviously itinerant workman.
As to the wood, that it has not been identified precisely means little. The piece given to a forester for possible identification was exceedingly small (only about 3/4-inch square by 1/8-inch thick) whereas much larger (six-inch) pieces are preferred by the U.S. Forest Services Center for Wood Anatomy (which has made many famous identifications, including artifacts taken from King Tuts tomb and the ladder involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping) (Knight 1997). The wood has reportedly been identified as to family, Pinaceae, and genus, Picea i.e., spruce (Easley 1997), a type of light, strong, elastic wood often used in construction ("Spruce 1960). But there are no fewer than thirty-nine species ten in North America so that comparison of the Loretto sample with only two varieties (Easley 1997) can scarcely be definitive.
