Hebronville Painters — National Register mill village

The area was earlier called Chaffee's Mills; the name Hebronville came in 1827. The village you see now dates from 1853, when B.B. & R. Knight Co. of Providence bought the cotton mill, rebuilt it after a lightning fire and reopened it in July 1854. The Knights went on to build housing for their workers, a company store and a post office, and by around 1900 about 1,000 people lived in the village. Their mills wove the cloth sold as "Fruit of the Loom."

The 1984 National Register nomination by the Massachusetts Historical Commission describes a quiet, linear district of about 10.5 acres along Knight Avenue, Read Street and Phillip Street. Of its 38 properties, 36 count as contributing. According to the nomination, most of the houses were built and owned by the mill as company tenements between 1854 and 1874, ranging from one- and two-family units up to four-family blocks, with the two-unit plan the most common. All are wood-frame and modest in scale, set around a three- to five-story brick mill in the Second Empire style.

Greek Revival duplexes in wood shingle

The nomination's example of the early two-unit plan, 190–92 Knight Avenue, is a 1½-story Greek Revival house faced in wood shingles, with corner returns at the roof, 6/6 wood windows, transomed doors and a brick foundation. Shingles and multi-pane sash take more cutting-in and hand work than flat clapboard, and two front doors mean two sets of entry trim on one facade.

Asbestos shingles and later siding

By 1984, 160 Knight Avenue, a four-family house, had asbestos shingles over its walls and 2/2 replacement sash, and the nomination notes that several tenements wore siding it called unsympathetic to the originals. Painted asbestos-cement shingle should never be sanded or power-washed hard. If you are unsure what your walls are covered with, have it identified before any prep is planned.

Ornament on a few buildings

Some buildings carry far more detail than the plain tenements around them. They include the early-1860s Italianate store and post office with its big bracketed cornice, a Gothic Revival cottage at 98 Knight Avenue built in 1853 with gingerbread trim, and the 1883 Stick Style Methodist church in clapboard and half-timber. Brackets and sawn trim mean slow scraping, careful priming of end grain and more ladder time than wall area alone suggests.

Lead-era paint layers

The district's houses went up long before 1978, most of them between 1854 and 1874, so earlier coats may well contain lead, and only a test settles it. Paid work that disturbs more than 20 square feet of exterior paint, or 6 square feet inside, falls under EPA lead-safe rules; our lead-safe painting page explains containment and cleanup.