Whitinsville Painters — Whitinsville Historic District and the mill streets

The Whitin family's mills shaped this village, and the National Park Service credits the family with nearly 1,000 units of worker housing between the 1820s and 1920s. The Whitinsville Historic District, added to the National Register in 1983, takes in about 350 structures on roughly 250 acres. Its nomination describes a valley closed in by steep hills to the north and south, with Linwood Pond and Meadow Pond on either side.

That nomination lists Greek Revival, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival and American Colonial houses in significant numbers, plus smaller traces of Federal, Italianate, Mansard, Stick and Shingle work. Queen Anne accounts for roughly a third of the houses, around 97 buildings, and patterned shingles in the gable ends come up again and again. The park service points to particular survivors: three Federal-style workers' houses from 1826 and an 1864 row on Fletcher Street, duplexes from 1847 to 1864 on High Street, and a dense run of mill houses on Forest Street.

Census figures for the Whitinsville census-designated place put the median year built at 1962, with 1,169 of 3,142 units dating to 1939 or earlier. Detached single-family houses make up 43.6% of units, attached single-family another 21.2%, and two- to four-unit buildings 24.8%. Owners occupy 59.3% of occupied homes. So the historic stock shares the village with postwar and later houses, and 56.4% of all units are single-family attached or in buildings of two or more units.

Patterned shingles in the gables

Cut shingles in a Queen Anne gable present far more edges and overlaps than a run of clapboard. Each course has to be scraped, primed where bare and brushed into the gaps, and owners can choose whether the shingle field gets its own color or matches the body.

Duplexes, row houses and tenements

The district was built with two-family and multi-family company housing, and today 780 units in the village sit in two- to four-unit buildings. Where the halves of a duplex belong to different people, both owners decide color and timing if the facade is to look like one building again.

Re-siding already on record in 1983

Even at listing, the nomination noted scattered synthetic siding, including one house whose patterned shingles had been covered. On a house wrapped that way, the paintable work may come down to trim, doors, sash and porches. If siding is removed, the condition of the wood underneath is unknown until it is exposed.

Lead rules on pre-1978 paint

Of the village's units, 60.2% fall in Census brackets ending in 1979, and federal rules require certified, lead-safe practices for paid work that disturbs paint in homes built before 1978. Our lead-safe painting page covers setup, containment and cleanup.