Rockdale Painters — Plantation, McBride, Taft and Church Streets

Sylvanus Holbrook of Uxbridge started a small wooden textile mill here in 1814, and for years the place was called Holbrook's Upper Village. A string of fires between 1846 and 1852 took out the mill and nearly the whole settlement. In 1856 the Whitins bought the land and water rights, and a three-story granite mill went up the next year on the edge of the Blackstone River. The Paul Whitin Manufacturing Company took over in 1870.

According to the National Register nomination for the Rockdale Common Housing District, most of the village's homes were built while Harry T. Whitin ran the company, from the 1890s to the late 1920s, largely to house the French-Canadian immigrants brought in to work the mill. The nomination describes the blocks west of the district, along Church and Taft Streets, as mostly small two-story buildings holding two or four tenements.

The district itself, listed in 1983, covers just 1.03 acres and six buildings put up between 1880 and 1917. Four 1917 Colonial Revival triple-deckers on Plantation and McBride Streets stand three stories on two-foot granite foundations, seven bays wide and eight deep, with three-sided end bays and wooden porches running the full height. The oldest building, 46–50 Plantation Street, was built as an Italianate two-family with porches across the front and large brackets under the gables; 37–42 Taft Street is a six-family Colonial Revival row 18 bays long. At nomination time all six were being rehabilitated for low-income family and elderly housing.

Three stories of porch

On the Plantation and McBride triple-deckers, porches climb the whole facade between the end bays. Every level brings its own posts, rails, balusters, floor and ceiling, and the third tier sits high enough that reaching it safely is part of the job plan.

Clapboard everywhere

The nomination says all six district buildings are wood frame faced with clapboard, and the Taft Street row had its asphalt shingle cover stripped off to bring the clapboard back. Painted clapboard only holds up with periodic repainting, so bringing it back also meant taking on that upkeep.

Brackets and window frames

The nomination calls the Italianate building's paired gable brackets unusually decorative compared with most village housing of that period. Those, plus plain cornerboards and flat or molded wood frames around each window, add up to a lot of trim that gets brushed by hand.

A mixed census tract

Tract 7503, which contains 20 McBride and 50 Plantation Streets, is broader than the village: its median home dates to 1974, and 22.0% of its units sit in buildings of five or more. Before 1980 is the build date for 55.5% of the tract's units, and federal lead-safe rules cover paid work that disturbs paint in homes built before 1978; see our lead-safe painting page.