Charles Chambers

Charles Chambers was a West End landowner and a judge on the Court of Common Pleas from 1719 to 1739.

Judge Chambers served as a colonial representative from Charlestown intermittently between 1708 and 1730, and as a judge on the Court of Common Pleas from 1719-1739, when he resigned his post for unknown reasons. Chambers was also involved in West Indies trade, through which he amassed significant wealth. 

Chambers owned four acres of pasture in the West End, through which his namesake Chambers Street ran long after the pasture’s development, until it’s integration into Cardinal O’Connell Way during urban renewal.

Little else was known of the judge even a few decades after his death; only his blood relationships to a number of other pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts judges, and a portrait in judges attire by John Smibert, currently held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.