DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker at Chambersea tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, out here in Chambers County, there's a house that's been keeping secrets since 1845. It's called Chambersea, and from the moment you lay eyes on it, you know this is a place with a story wound tight inside its walls.
The man who built it was Thomas Jefferson Chambers — early civic leader, business leader, and by all accounts a man who did not do things halfway. You want proof? Look up.
Right there in the west gable, there's a window cut in the shape of a star. Not carved into a post, not painted on a sign — a window. A star-shaped window, so that the light itself came through in the shape of the thing he loved.
The marker puts it plainly: that window was his proclamation of love for Texas, and he built it right into the bones of the house. Now the house itself, folks call it modest — board-and-batten construction, pioneer style. But modest doesn't mean plain.
Because out front, rising up to greet you, there is a spiral stairway on the exterior of the building. Graceful, they say, and that word earns its keep. You don't often see a pioneer house putting on that kind of elegance out in the open air.
Around the house, Chambers built a whole world. Plantings. A white lattice summer house.
Barns. Outbuildings. This was the center of a plantation, and for years it hummed along as such.
But here is where the story turns, and you feel it coming the way you feel weather on the back of your neck. In 1863, Thomas Jefferson Chambers was assassinated. Right there.
At Chambersea. The very place he'd built, the place with the star window facing west, the place with that spiral stair rising up like a flourish — that is where it ended for him. The house is still standing.
The star is still in the gable. And that stairway still spirals up toward the sky, graceful as ever, holding the whole story inside it.
What the marker says
Built in 1845. Home of Thomas Jefferson Chambers, early civic and business leader whose love for Texas was proclaimed by the "Star" window in the west gable. The modest board-and-batten pioneer house has another unique feature in the graceful, spiral exterior stairway at the front. Surrounded by plantings, white lattice summer house, barns and outbuildings, this was center of plantation until Chambers was assassinated here in 1863. RTHL - 1968