Powel House

Philadelphia
PA
Powel House

Powel House

OTHER IMAGES

Mrs. Samuel Powel, c. 1793

QUICK FACTS
  • 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.
LINKS
LOCATION
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
Powel, Samuel

The Federalists of the 1780s had a glimpse of what America was to become — a scrambling business society dominated by the pecuniary interests of ordinary people — and they did not like what they saw. This premonition of America’s future lay behind their sense of crisis and their horrified hyperbolic rhetoric. The wholesale pursuits of private interest and private luxury were, they thought, undermining America’s capacity for republican government. They designed the Constitution in order to save American republicanism from the deadly effects of the private pursuits of happiness.

— Gordon S. Wood
The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (2011)