President's House (Philadelphia)

President's House in Philadelphia was the third U.S. presidential mansion. George Washington occupied the Philadelphia President's House from November 27, 1790 to March 10, 1797. John and Abigail Adams occupied the house from March 21, 1797 to May 30, 1800.

The Philadelphia house was located on what is now Market Street, one block north of Independence Hall (then known as the Pennsylvania State House). It had been built by widow Mary Masters around 1767, who gave it as a wedding present to her daughter Mary, who married Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania, Richard Penn. During the 1777–1778 British occupation of Philadelphia, the house was headquarters for General Sir William Howe, Commander of the British Army. The British abandoned the city in June 1778, and the house next became headquarters for the military governor of Philadelphia, American General Benedict Arnold.

Robert Morris, a financier of the Revolutionary War and a Founding Father, purchased the house following a January 1780 fire, and restored and expanded it. George Washington was his houseguest when in Philadelphia, including for the May-to-September 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention, which met at Independence Hall.

Philadelphia served as the temporary national capital from 1790 to 1800, while Washington, D.C. was under construction. Then U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania Robert Morris gave up the house for use by President Washington, who insisted on paying rent. Morris also owned the house next door, to which he and his family moved.

In November 1790, Washington brought eight enslaved Africans from Mount Vernon to work in his presidential household: Moll, Oney Judge, Christoper Sheels, Austin, Giles, Paris, Hercules Posey, and Posey's son Richmond. A ninth enslaved African from Mount Vernon, "Postilion" Joe, joined the presidential household following Austin's December 20, 1794 death in Maryland.

The house also served as the executive mansion for the second U.S. president, John Adams. He spent most of his single term in Philadelphia, and moved into the not-yet-completed White House in Washington, D.C., on November 1, 1800. Later that month, Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams in the 1800 Presidential Election, although Jefferson was not inaugurated until March 1801. In 1951, confusion over the exact location of the Philadelphia President's House led to its surviving walls being unknowingly demolished for what is now Independence National Historical Park, or Independence Mall.

Advocacy by historians and African American groups resulted in the 2010 commemoration of the site as a memorial to the nine slaves in Washington's household and the history of slavery in the United States. In 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to promote a more positive view of the nation's history, resulting in the January 2026 removal of all exhibits at the site, and sparking a lawsuit that saw some of the displays restored for the duration of the case.