Birds Hill Painters — Beaufort Avenue, Hillcrest Road & Hersey station

Benjamin Bird bought land here in 1746 but never moved onto it. John Bird married Mary Lyon of Needham in 1755 and built a house for her west of the hill; a 1912 account notes that he served as a soldier in the Revolution. That house, at 94 Beaufort Avenue, is on the state historic inventory as a Colonial dated 1755. The Boston Basin Hills survey lists the summit at 299 feet, and a 2.5-million-gallon water tank built in 1972 occupies the high ground between Hillcrest and Morningside roads.

The railroad gave the area a stop in 1917, when Bird's Hill station opened on Great Plain Avenue as an infill stop on the 1906 cutoff. The legislature had it renamed in 1980 for selectman Henry D. Hersey, and it reopened under that name in 1987. A handful of 19th-century houses near the hill are inventoried as well: an 1864 Italianate at 28 Wyoming Avenue, an 1876 Victorian Eclectic at 90 Prince Street and the 1887 Italianate Bowers-Page House at 613 Great Plain Avenue.

Census Tract 4031, which takes in both the Bird house and Hersey station, has 2,520 homes, and 87.6% of them are single-family detached. The 1950s produced 23.1% of the stock and the 1940s another 11.8%; 21.5% predates 1940, and 14.4% was built in 2010–19. The median year built is 1957, and 90.8% of homes are owner-occupied.

Mid-century houses are the core of the stock

With about a third of the tract built in the 1940s and 1950s, a large share of the tract's houses are now roughly 65 to 85 years old. On wood of that age, paint failure tends to show at window sills, the bottom courses of siding and anywhere gutters overflow.

Lead is likely in early coats

Lead-based house paint was sold until the 1978 federal ban, and in this tract 68.8% of homes were built before 1980. Sanding or scraping those surfaces calls for lead-safe methods: plastic on the ground, dust control and HEPA cleanup.

Replacement homes next to older ones

Townwide, the Planning Board estimates that about 89% of new single- and two-family house permits from mid-2013 to mid-2023 were for replacement homes. The census doesn't say how many of this tract's 364 homes from 2010–19 replaced older ones, but where a new house has fiber-cement or factory-primed siding, it needs different handling than repainted wood, so it and a 1950s neighbor rarely call for the same prep.

An 18th-century frame needs a lighter touch

On a house as old as the 1755 Bird house, original clapboards and trim are irreplaceable. Hand scraping, careful repair of soft wood and a primer suited to old oil-based coatings help keep that material in service.