Where most people see Seven Fields borough, Gray Weller Jr. — grandson of Clyde Speer — sees the place he “grew up.”

“This was all Valley Farms at one time for my grandfather,” Weller said.

In the mid-1940s, according to Weller, his grandfather bought 550 acres in Cranberry Township as a “gentleman” farmer. The property would go on to become Seven Fields in 1983.

“Valley Farms, which is currently Seven Fields with almost exactly the same property line, he bought a section of it from Lee Refold,” Weller said.

As a gentleman farmer, Speer worked the farm on his weekends away from his job as a coal executive, Weller said, purchasing additional sections from the Gillespie and Nesbit families.

The heart of Valley Farms was Speer’s barn and farmhouse at the present intersection of Seven Fields Boulevard and Old Mars Crider Road — and it still stands today.

“At this time it’s owned by a family up in Butler (Township),” Weller said. “They bought the farmhouse, the barn and 10 acres behind it. I think they want to turn it into a bed and breakfast, but they’re not quite there yet.”

And just across the road, once stood Weller’s childhood home.

“Unfortunately, the house I grew up in is knocked down,” he said.

Speer sold the property, which was in turn sold for development, according to Weller.

“My sister gets emotional, because if you go look at the farmhouse and make a right, you’ll see a little piece of driveway,” Weller said. “And that’s all that’s left of our place.”

Seated in his Mars home — just a mile from his grandfather’s property — Weller leafed through family photographs of his childhood on the property.

“I mean, for me, these pictures bring back,” Weller said, pausing, “just some really, really good times.”

Before Weller had even set foot on the farm, he said his family passed down the story of his mother’s engagement in a snowy field just across from his childhood home.

“My mom and dad, they got married in 1948, so my grandpa had had the farm for a couple years prior,” he said. “There’s a picture of my mom and dad, and they got engaged on a sleigh.”

On that winter day in 1947, Gray Weller Sr. proposed to the younger Weller’s mother, Natalie Weller, from a sleigh drawn by Speer’s horses — on what is now Hidden Oaks development in Adams Township.

“It was very cool,” Weller said. “It’s very romantic, like a Hallmark movie.”

He also recalled hunting with his older brother and his sister’s boyfriend in Valley Farm’s fields — from the seat of the boyfriend’s father’s car.

“We would take his dad’s Impala out in the fields,” Weller said, laughing, “going after groundhogs.”

The group’s hunting grounds, according to Weller, have become the parking lot of Seven Field’s Giant Eagle Supermarket.

For Weller, having grown up on his grandfather’s farm, there is very little in Seven Fields that wasn’t at one time a part of his childhood.

He said the change from farmland to borough was “dramatic,” and that he had recently discussed it with his wife Lyn — a Ford City native — at the Dented Keg Brewing Company along Seven Field’s border.

“Sometimes we’re out on the patio and I mention to Lyn, ‘You know, this was the southern edge of my grandfather’s property,’” he said. “I walked around here, I rode my bike on certain parts of it.”

Speer died in 1960, willing the property to Weller’s mother Natalie and her two sisters, Virginia Baldwin and Betty Schenk.

“For the next 19 years, part of the farm and Speer’s house was sold to Al Koenig,” he said. “Al was president of Carrier Air Conditioning Company. Similar to my grandfather, he worked the farm on the weekends.”

In 1979, then, the three sisters sold the property for $1 million to developer Thomas J. Reilly.

Reilly, of McKeesport, Allegheny County, immediately began the construction of Canterbury Village.

In 1982, though, the township voted to take legal action against Reilly and his 70-resident development for its ongoing construction without the proper permits.

Reilly, having petitioned to incorporate a separate borough on the land in 1981, fought for nearly two years to secede. On Aug. 25, 1983, the borough was officially incorporated.

But while the borough saw steady growth following its inception, Reilly was convicted of 23 felony counts in 1992 — involving tax evasion and fraud surrounding the development of Canterbury Village.

“Generally, it was a Ponzi scheme that he started,” Weller said.

Investors in Reilly’s Seven Fields Development Corporations had been receiving “returns” from new investment dollars collected from other investors, according to accounts of the trial.

Following Reilly’s conviction, the investors took ownership of the corporation until 2002, when the remaining undeveloped land in the borough was bought by two real estate companies.

Today 2,919 people live in the 518-acre bough, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.

Despite nearly half a decade of progress since his grandfather’s farm became a borough, Weller said he still loves the area — and that his grandfather would have appreciated its growth.

“He was a smart guy who knew progress, I’d guess he would have been OK with it,” Weller said. “But, he obviously loved the property.”

Reflecting on the family photos on his coffee table, though, Weller said seeing what the borough once was made him emotional.

“We would sled ride down that hill,” Weller said. “It was great fun for my sisters and brothers and I just to hang out and do farm stuff.”

With his siblings now spread across the state and country, according to Weller, the one-time farm remains a uniting memory for the family.

“I mean, here we are some 40 years later, everybody’s doing their own thing, but we have great memories here,” Weller said.