This is the caretaker’s house at the estate of Arthur G. Walton shown here in the summer of 1938, one year after the death of Mr. Walton, a Wakefield native who became a wealthy shoe manufacturer.
The Walton Estate was located on approximately 2.7 acres at 108 Main Street (roughly where Walden Road is now). Walton had purchased the property in 1907 from Dr. Francis Hurd, for whom the Hurd School was named. Walton also owned large tracts of land along Main and Lowell streets.
It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that at one time, Arthur G. Walton owned half of Wakefield. To this day, the Walton name appears everywhere on buildings, fields and streets, such as the Walton School, Walton Field, Walton Street, Walton Lane, Walton Place and the Walton Block in Wakefield Square. Even the homophonous Walden Road, which runs through the former site of the Walton Estate, is likely a sly reference to the Walton name.
On July 3, 1937, one month before his death, Arthur Walton attended the wedding of his daughter, Mary C. Walton to Valentine Giamatti. The couple’s son A. Bartlett Giamatti, born in 1938, would go on to become president of Yale University. Later, as Commissioner of Major League Baseball, he banned Pete Rose for life for gambling on baseball.
Giammatti’s son (Walton’s great-grandson) is Hollywood actor Paul Giamatti.
On the afternoon of July 18, 1940, the Wakefield Fire Department received a frantic call from Walton Estate caretaker Hans Meyer, who still lived in the caretaker’s house shown in today’s photo, reporting that the old Walton family mansion was on fire. The property had been sold a couple of years earlier to developer Pasquale DeChristofaro (for whom Christofaro Street is named).
The fire would be blamed on union trouble involving the demolition workers taking down the old Walton mansion.