Society Hill was the finest residential district in colonial America, and it has been preserved more completely than any other eighteenth-century American neighborhood. Society Hill — named for the Free Society of Traders, a commercial company that held land here in the 1680s — was Philadelphia's most fashionable address in the decades before and after the Revolution. The Powel House on South Third Street, built in 1765, was the home of Samuel Powel, the last mayor of colonial Philadelphia and the first mayor of the American city.
Powel and his wife Elizabeth were the preeminent hosts of revolutionary Philadelphia, entertaining Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin in the extraordinary interior of this house, with its carved woodwork and imported wallpapers. The house was slated for demolition in 1931 and saved by the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks. Society Hill as a neighborhood was saved in the 1960s, when the city acquired and renovated hundreds of Georgian and Federal row houses that had been converted to rooming houses and warehouses.
The three-block area of Headhouse Square and Pine Street retains the scale and character of eighteenth-century residential Philadelphia more intact than anywhere else in America.