Stoneham Slate & Copper Roofing

Stoneham was a shoe town before it was a suburb. In the 1800s its shops turned out more shoes than anywhere else in Middlesex County, and the money that made built the Victorians, mansards, and Italianate houses you still see around the common. The roof a house needs here depends on which era it came from. Art Slate Roofing has worked Stoneham for over twenty years, a straight run north from our Cambridge shop. The owner walks every roof, we measure on site, and the same in-house crew installs what we quote. On a house that was built for slate, we will not push asphalt.

What the era and the setting tell us

Stoneham broke off from Charlestown in 1725 and grew up around the common at Summer and Pleasant Streets. The shoe-manufacturing boom of the 1800s filled the center with substantial homes, and Boston businessmen built stone and Italianate retreats along Spot Pond at the edge of the Middlesex Fells. Toward the Fells and Bear Hill the stock turns to postwar capes and colonials. Each of those asks for a different roof.

Slate and copper on Stoneham’s older homes

Most of our Stoneham work sits on the homes near the center and the common, built in an era when slate and copper were standard and now reaching the end of their first life. On a period house, a like-for-like slate roof holds the character that a switch to asphalt throws away, and it lasts generations rather than decades. The town’s Italianate and mansard houses, from the granite John Bottume House on Spot Pond that now serves as the Middlesex Fells visitor center to the mansard and tower homes around the center, were roofed in slate for a reason. If you want the background on how the shoe boom shaped the building stock, the Town of Stoneham publishes its history. For the restoration side of that work, see our historic roof restoration service and a cupola we restored on an older home. If you are wondering whether a roof is at that point, our note on when a slate roof needs replacement lays out the signs.

Ice dams at the edge of the Fells

Stoneham’s homes bordering the Middlesex Fells and Spot Pond sit under heavy tree canopy, so north-facing slopes hold snow, moss, and debris long after open lots have cleared. Attic heat melts the snow from below, the runoff refreezes at the cold eave, and the dam backs water under the slate. The valleys and the copper flashing at the chimneys are usually where a Stoneham roof starts to leak first, and New England’s freeze-thaw swing works every joint on an older roof. Clearing the ice is the symptom. We fix the ventilation, the flashing, and the eave detail that let the dam form. More on why copper holds up in our note on copper roofing in Boston winters, and on the fix itself in preventing ice dams in New England.

Trades we run in Stoneham