Living in Stoneham, MA

About Stoneham

Early explorers called this land Charlestown End, and Governor Winthrop's party is said to have lunched by Spot Pond in 1632. Farmers settled slowly, and the town broke from Charlestown on December 17, 1725. A stagecoach line on the Medford to Andover Turnpike in 1833 brought house lots, and shoemaking grew from home workshops into more than forty manufacturers. That era left Central Square, with its Second Empire commercial blocks, the 1904 library, and churches lining the north side at Common Street.

A few blocks west of the square, Nobility Hill keeps Italianate, Stick and Queen Anne houses from about 1860 to 1920. The Middlesex Fells covers roughly a third of the town, with Spot Pond, Bear Hill and the Stone Zoo, founded in 1905. Stoneham's housing plan counts slightly more than half its homes as single-family, with much of the rest in larger buildings. The Tri-Community Greenway runs from Gould Street toward Woburn and Winchester.

Much of the Fells land in Stoneham was shaped by the Boston area's water supply. Spot Pond was enlarged into a storage reservoir for communities north of Boston, its level raised by 16 feet, and the Metropolitan District Commission replaced several town pumping stations with a single pumping station and gatehouse, listed on the National Register in 1984. Bear Hill Reservoir, just west of I-93 near the summit of Bear Hill, was built in 1902 and 1903 with two concrete dams and a gatehouse. Spot Pond is no longer part of the drinking water supply, and the John Botume House, a 19th-century granite house on its eastern shore, now serves as the reservation's visitor center.

Homes in Stoneham

Stoneham's Housing Production Plan reports that 57.1% of housing units are single-family homes, and nearly half of the remaining multifamily units are in buildings of 20 or more units. About 65% of homes are owner-occupied. The plan points to the town center around Main Street as the area best suited for new housing.