Greenwood Painters — South end of Wakefield

The state's MACRIS inventory records that the Green family settled south of Crystal Lake, in the area later known as Greenwood. A developer named Henry Savage tried to build the area out as a residential district in the 1880s and did not succeed, though he did put up the turreted Colonial Revival house at 52 Oak Street. What changed things was transit. The Wakefield Historical Society writes that once a streetcar line to Boston opened in 1892, many people who worked in the city chose Greenwood as a home for their families.

The National Register houses here date from that period. The house at 118 Greenwood Street, from about 1875, is described in its listing as a rare, well-preserved Stick-style design with board-and-batten siding. The Greenwood Union Church at Main and Oak, begun in 1884 to plans by Wait & Cutter, is Queen Anne. On Francis Avenue stands an octagon-plan house sheathed in shingles above a high fieldstone foundation.

Census Tract 3354, which covers the town's southern end including Oak Street, Greenwood Avenue and Francis Avenue, is a district of owner-occupied single-family houses. Of its 2,011 housing units, 82.2% are single-family detached and 87.4% of occupied homes are owned. About 39% were built in 1939 or earlier, and another 28% went up in the 1940s and 1950s, which puts the median year built at 1948. Tract lines are not neighborhood lines, so some streets people call Greenwood, especially east of Main Street, are counted in a different tract.

Board-and-batten and applied stickwork

Stick-style houses like the one at 118 Greenwood Street wear their framing on the outside: vertical battens, gable bracing, sawtooth edging and bracketed hoods. Each batten edge and brace joint is a seam where water can sit, so those seams get the closest look during prep. Preparation means working every edge by hand, and caulk only goes where a joint is meant to be sealed, never across the gaps that let the boards move.

Turrets, wraparound porches and paneled piers

The 1890s house at 52 Oak Street combines a turret with a wraparound porch. A turret's curved walls and roof edge need staging that can follow the curve, and its porch columns on paneled piers mean dozens of small faces to scrape and prime. Porch floors and steps take a different coating than the walls above them.

Mid-century houses with original layers

Roughly 28% of the tract's homes date from the 1940s and 1950s. These simpler houses have far less trim than their Victorian neighbors, but paint from those decades can contain lead, so sanding or scraping on them follows the same lead-safe rules as on an older house.

Shingles over fieldstone

The Francis Avenue octagon pairs wood shingles with a tall fieldstone base. Shingled walls should be checked for whether they were stained or painted before choosing a product, and the joint where wood siding meets a stone foundation is where splash-back and ground moisture lift paint from the bottom course.