Powel House

Philadelphia
PA

Powel House

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  • When chevalier de Chastellux visited the Powels in 1780, he wrote of Samuel Powel’s wife, Elizabeth:

     

    Contrary to American custom, she plays the leading role in the family — la prima figura, as the Italians say ... but what chiefly distinguishes her is her taste for conversation and the truly European manner in which she uses her wit and knowledge.
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Samuel Powel was the last royal mayor of Philadelphia and the first mayor of the city after the newly established U.S. in 1789. The house includes paintings, period furniture, as well as a formal garden.
Associated People

Virtually all modern accounts of the Revolution begin in 1763 with the Peace of Paris, the great treaty that concluded the Seven Years’ War. Opening the story there, however, makes the imperial events and conflicts that followed the war — the controversy over the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act crisis — into precursors of the Revolution. No matter how strenuous their other disagreements, most modern historians have looked at the years after 1763 not as contemporary Americans and Britons saw them — as a postwar era vexed by the unanticipated problems in relations between the colonies and metropolis — but as what we in retrospect know those years to have been, a pre-Revolutionary period. By sneaking glances, in effect, at what was coming next, historians robbed their accounts of contingency and suggested, less by design than by inadvertence, that the independence and nationhood of the United States were somehow inevitable.

Fred Anderson
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754 - 1766 (2000)