Farm Hill Painters — High Street and Keene Street, northeast of Central Square

Farm Hill is one of the two USGS-listed hills in Stoneham that sit outside the Middlesex Fells, rising to 217 feet northeast of Central Square. The Massachusetts Historical Commission's 1981 survey of the town called the early settlement there an isolated outpost of Charlestown by the mid-1600s, and an 1890 county history put one early settler's house near the line of today's High Street. In 1861 the railroad's first section of track through central Stoneham was laid to Farm Hill, between Main and Central Streets. A century later the Farm Hill Shopping Center went up, in the 1950s and 1960s, according to the town's 2024 preservation plan.

The houses the state has actually recorded cluster on High Street, within about 320 meters of the summit. Six records sit there, dated from about 1800 to 1920. Two are on the National Register: the George Cowdrey House at number 42 (c. 1865), described as one of the town's finest Second Empire houses, and the Walter Keene House at number 28 (c. 1900), a transitional Queen Anne and Colonial Revival design. Keene, a shoe salesman and banker, helped develop much of the surrounding area, and Keene Street carries his name. The c. 1800 Hay Tavern Office at number 65 is marked demolished.

The preservation plan describes 39 High Street, a 1920 bungalow, as the start of a second wave of building along the street in the 1920s. Beyond those records, the best picture of the wider area comes from Census Tract 3372.01, which holds High Street and the summit but also a good deal more. Its median home was built in 1962, and 51.2% of its 1,538 units date from the 1950s and 1960s. Only 17.6% go back to 1939 or earlier. The tract is split almost evenly by building type: 47.2% single-family detached and 48.2% in buildings of five or more units.

Mansards, dormers and scrollwork

The Cowdrey House has a clapboard body under a mansard roof, with dormers capped by segmental arches and trimmed in scrollwork, plus a porch on round Tuscan columns that wraps to a corner gazebo. Work on a house like this is mostly detail work. Each dormer face and carved bracket gets hand-scraped and spot-primed, and staging has to reach the steep lower slope of the mansard without anyone standing on it.

Shingle and clapboard on one wall

The plan notes that the Keene house combines shingle and clapboard surfaces with a corner tower. The two surfaces get separate prep: clapboard laps are scraped and caulked, while split or cupped shingles are replaced before primer. The corner tower needs its own staging or ladder setup, planned before the walls beside it.

Postwar houses and lead testing

Any house from the 1950s or 1960s predates the federal 1978 lead-paint line, and 80.7% of the tract's units were built before 1980. If paint tests positive, any job above the EPA's small-area thresholds follows lead-safe work practices, with containment and HEPA cleanup. That applies to the interior as well as the exterior.

Larger multifamily buildings

Nearly one in five units in the tract (19.2%) is in a building of 50 or more units. The census does not say whether those units are condos or rentals. Where a building is a condominium, exterior and hallway work goes through the association, with scheduling and insurance paperwork settled before anyone starts; see condo painting in Stoneham.