Downtown Milford Painters — Main Street, Congress Street, School Street & the Bow Streets

The Massachusetts Historical Commission maps the center as two inventory areas: Milford Center, the streets north of Main such as Congress, School, Pine and Spruce, and the Main Street Area, which takes in Central Street and North and South Bow Streets. Between them the inventory records 154 standing buildings dated 1805 to 1930, and 139 of those predate 1900. Of the 124 with a residential use, 58 are listed as multiple-family or apartment houses.

The style tags on those homes lean heavily toward the mid-1800s: Greek Revival on 31 records, Italianate and Victorian Eclectic on 18 each, Second Empire on 15 and Queen Anne on 11. MHC's 1983 survey of Milford called the side-passage plan by far the most popular house form in the center, with two-story, center-entrance Italianate and Second Empire houses frequent on the blocks north of the business district. Just south of Main Street, in the industrial section, it described mostly simple side-passage houses and gabled duplexes.

Census Tract 7443, which takes in Town Hall at 52 Main Street along with addresses on School and Jefferson Streets, counts 1,853 housing units. Of those, 61.6% were built in 1939 or earlier, 51.3% sit in buildings with two to four units, and 73.5% of occupied homes are rented. The landmark commercial blocks on Main Street are masonry, among them the 1888 Gillon Block in patterned brick and the granite Thom Block of 1891; Memorial Hall (1884), north of Main Street, is local granite. Town Hall is the exception: MHC notes it is the only major public building in town not built of Milford pink granite.

Greek Revival and Italianate wood trim

Corner boards, gable-end returns, bracketed eaves and window hood molds are built from many small pieces of wood. Their joints and end grain tend to let water in before flat clapboard does, so prep means scraping to sound paint, filling or consolidating soft spots and priming bare wood before color goes on.

Duplexes and multi-family houses on tight lots

Just over half the tract's units are in two- to four-unit buildings, and MHC noted gabled duplexes south of Main Street. On a building like that, ladder setups in a narrow side yard, porch access for each unit and notice to tenants can shape the schedule as much as square footage does.

Layers that may contain lead

When six in ten homes in the tract date from before 1940, the base layers on siding, sashes and porch parts should be treated as possibly lead-bearing until tested. Paid work that scrapes or sands more than 20 square feet of exterior paint on a pre-1978 home is covered by the EPA's RRP rule; see lead-safe painting for how that work is contained.

Listed buildings, no paint review found

Town Hall, Memorial Hall, the Gillon Block and the Thom Block are individually on the National Register. The National Park Service says listing places no restrictions on a private owner's own work outside federally assisted projects. Our research turned up no local historic district or color review in Milford.