By 1849, the year Thomas Foster Wells married Sarah Morrill, he was in partnership with John Emery Gowen, trading in West India goods and importing liquors and wine.

[10] By 1874, the family was living in a house at 137 Highland Street near Roxbury, from which Thomas Wells commuted to his office at 3 Merchants Row in Boston, where he worked in real estate.

[11] In 1880, Thomas and Sarah Wells were living with their daughter Annie at Winchester, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, where the father worked as a "trader in stocks," and where for a time he was president of the Granular Metal Co.[12][13] Beginning in 1865 until about 1869,[14] Joseph Wells attended the West Newton English and Classical School (aka the Allen School) in West Newton, Massachusetts, where he studied subjects such as art, music, dancing, and ethics, and where he was required to keep a daily journal (which he continued to keep for the rest of his life).

His current reputation as having been an important member of the firm derives in part from the recollections of the architect Harold Van Buren Magonigle, who for a time worked alongside Wells, and recalled him in an article written in 1934.

He credited Wells with the design (based on White's preliminary sketches) of the firm's Villard Houses (1884), and the detailing of the facade of the Century Association's New York clubhouse (1891).

Earlier, in 1924, Magonigle made even greater claims for Wells, writing that "there was a moment of great promise in the history of American design when it looked as though the influence of the genius of Joseph Morrill Wells would direct American thought toward a virile and fruitful eclecticism that would lead in its turn toward an architecture we could fairly call our own...but Wells died in the very early nineties...the [1893 Chicago] World's Fair came on and turned our minds toward Greece and Rome, and another Classic revival ensued...and so began the baneful use of precedent..."[20] The historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, writing in 1972, claimed the opposite for Wells—that he rejected eclecticism and embraced the use of precedent (Hitchcock called it "direct inspiration").

[25] Years later, Mead wrote of Wells's status as first among equals among the firm's employees during its early days: "In 1879, shortly before the establishment of the firm, Joseph M. Wells came into our office...I suppose he had merely a good high school education, but he was one of the most learned young men in literature and art whom I have ever met, and a most original thinker...in his quiet, almost unsocial, way he immediately made an impression upon all of us, and became our intimate friend and associate, not only in our work but in our daily lives...I recall the times when we four were working together in the bonds of true fellowship.

[27] He was buried in the Oak Grove Cemetery in Medford, Massachusetts, where Stanford White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens erected a tombstone in the form of a tall Greek stele.