Schaller Street has a surprisingly deep history. The strongest Town records indicate that the street and surrounding land were closely tied to the Schaller family going back to the 1800s.
A brief history of Schaller Street, Wellesley
Town of Wellesley Historical Commission records show several surviving historic houses on Schaller Street: 5 Schaller (1889), 9 Schaller (1877), 10 Schaller (1876), 16 Schaller (1914), 17 Schaller (1896), and 18 Schaller (1885).
The Schaller connection goes back even further. Records for 18 Schaller show that John B. Schaller transferred property to Ferdinand Schaller in 1884. The 1884 town report recorded John B. Schaller as owning a barn and more than five acres of land off Washington Street, while Ferdinand Schaller owned additional land there. By 1885, Ferdinand had a dwelling and approximately 2⅔ acres in the area then described as “Cape.”
The particularly interesting story behind 7 Schaller Street
The history becomes especially relevant to 7 Schaller Street. Historical Commission research for neighboring 17 Schaller documents that in 1929 John Schaller Jr. conveyed a larger property to Patrick F. Slamin. That property included the sites of what are now 7, 9 and 17 Schaller Street in Wellesley, plus 19 Schaller Street in Natick.
In 1946, that larger property was subdivided. At the time, the parcel included 9 Schaller Street, 17 Schaller Street (then identified as a barn), and the future site of 7 Schaller Street.
Public property records currently describe 7 Schaller Street as a Colonial-style single-family residence with approximately 1,488 square feet, four bedrooms, 1½ baths and a 10,019-square-foot/0.23-acre lot. Those records give its construction date as 1960.
That means the land beneath 7 Schaller has a substantially older history than the present house. It appears to have been part of a much larger Schaller-family property before the subdivision that ultimately created the current residential parcel.
There is another unusual piece of neighborhood history: because Schaller Street sits near the Wellesley–Natick boundary, Massachusetts passed special legislation in 2005 allowing certain Wellesley properties in the River Street–Schaller Street–Washington Street area to connect to Natick's sewer system.
For deeper house-by-house research, the Wellesley Historical Society maintains resources specifically for researching Wellesley homes, including photographs organized by street, directories, historic maps, annual reports and property resources.