The governor's house was confiscated during the Revolutionary War, and George and Martha Washington occupied it for several months, following the October 1781 victory at Yorktown.

In 1918, the owners sold the second floor rear parlor's architectural woodwork to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is now a period room in the American Wing.

Antiquarian Frances Wister saved the house, forming the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks and raising the funds to purchase the property in 1931.

Over the next decade, Wister and the Society bought and demolished the 19th-century building that covered the east end of the walled garden, and hired architect H. Louis Duhring Jr. to restore the house to its appearance during Powel's residency and re-create its lost interiors.

The Society opened the restored house as a museum interpreting the daily lives of wealthy Philadelphians at the time of the American Revolution.

Its beautiful entryway, ballroom with bas-relief plasterwork, and mahogany wainscoting give the house its reputation as perhaps America's finest existing Georgian Colonial townhouse.

In more recent years, it has been alleged that the house is haunted by the ghost of Peggy Shippen, Elizabeth Powel's second cousin and wife of Benedict Arnold.