The oldest neighborhood in Boston Massachusetts is the great area of Charleston. The original Massachusetts tribe named this area Mishawum. This area lies just north or above the Charles river placed on a peninsula which is also across from Boston’s downtown regions. This amazing area is also attached to a few more bodies of water, which is the Boston Harbor and the Mystic River. Thomas Graves was the individual who led the planning of Charleston in 1629, While also being under the rule of Charles I of England as an early settler. Charleston was the original capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and was also its own individual town.

Charleston was under the annex of Boston in 1874 no more than 30 years after it had become its own city. Through this annex, Charleston had then switched counties from its original Suffolk County to Middlesex County. The Great Irish Famine of the 1840’s had caused a substantial amount of the Irish population to migrate to the area of Charleston, which is the cause for the extremely large population of Irish-American Individuals within the area. The area and its neighborhoods have seen quite a lot of change which has to do with the region’s close proximity to the downtown area of Boston, as well as its original colonial style architecture. Many of Boston’s neighborhoods including Charleston have been influenced by the gentrification of the upper middle class as well as yuppie culture, yet the makeup of this area still has Irish origins strongly ingrained.