Charles Chambers
Charles Chambers was a West End landowner and a judge on the Court of Common Pleas from 1719 to 1739.
Topic: Politics & Law
Politics, politicians, political clubs, laws, lawyers, courts, jurisprudence, criminals, crime, law enforcement, jails
Charles Chambers was a West End landowner and a judge on the Court of Common Pleas from 1719 to 1739.
“Doc” Sagansky, the Jewish gambling boss who became the oldest organized crime figure to serve prison time, is one of the old West End’s more notorious residents. The money Sagansky made from illegal bookkeeping funded his business ventures and philanthropy: legitimate on the surface, corrupt at the source.
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and George Ruffin were eminent African-American residents of the West End in the late nineteenth-century. Josephine’s newspaper, The Woman’s Era, was published from her home and instrumental to the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. She was its first vice president.
John S. Rock was an accomplished Black dentist, doctor, lawyer, and abolitionist lecturer who resided on the north slope of Beacon Hill shortly before and during the Civil War.
George Parkman was a prominent businessman and philanthropist in Boston. He is best known for donating land to Harvard Medical College (now part of MGH) and his murder in that very location.
The West End was a backdrop of national history, in addition to local memory. President John F. Kennedy’s life as a veteran and public servant intersected with the West End community in subtle yet significant ways.
H.H. Holmes, widely considered to be the nation’s first serial killer, was apprehended after being tracked to the West End in 1894.
Thomas Hodson’s quarry extracted gravel from the north slope of Beacon Hill in the middle of the eighteenth century. This provoked public outrage, but the excavation of Beacon Hill for the expansion of Boston was too difficult to stop.