Gospel Hill Painters — East Main Street & Lewis Street

When the state's heritage landscape program held a public meeting in Hudson in 2006, residents named Gospel Hill their highest-priority heritage landscape. The resulting report said little active farming survived anywhere in town except here. It named Ferjulian Farm, about 50 acres of fields, orchards, greenhouses and a farm stand at the corner of East Main and Lewis Streets, and Pompositticut Farm, a 68-acre horse farm along East Main Street with open fields, farm buildings and stone walls in view of the road. Those descriptions are twenty years old, and the report itself called both farms vulnerable to change.

The same report explains where much of the surrounding housing came from: after World War II, many Hudson farms were sold for residential development and the town's population doubled. No official boundary for Gospel Hill turned up, but Census Tract 3221, which takes in Lewis Street and the 500 and 600 blocks of Main Street, gives a reasonable picture of the area. There, 89.5% of the 1,716 housing units are single-family detached, 36.2% were built in the 1960s, and 99.3% of occupied homes are owner-occupied.

A 1960s housing peak

More homes in Tract 3221 date from the 1960s than from any other decade in the census table. A house built then is now roughly 55 to 65 years old, and where original wood siding or trim is still painted, how well the oldest layers are bonded decides whether a new coat will hold or the surface needs more scraping and priming first.

Lead is still on the table

Of the tract's homes, 58.1% were built before 1980, and paint applied before the 1978 federal ban can sit under later coats. Paid work that disturbs more than 20 square feet outside or 6 square feet in a room of a pre-1978 house falls under EPA lead-safe rules. See the lead-safe painting page.

Open ground means full exposure

Where a house looks out on open fields rather than neighbors or tree cover, it takes sun and wind from more directions. On such a house, south- and west-facing clapboards and trim are the ones to inspect first when deciding how soon to repaint.

Mostly owner decisions

In the tract, 99.3% of occupied homes are lived in by their owners and no units are estimated in buildings of five or more, so on a typical house here the scheduling and color choices belong to one household rather than an association or landlord.