History & local legend
Chalkley Hall once stood in Philadelphia near Wheatsheaf Lane and Sepviva Street. The house took shape around an earlier residence associated with Quaker merchant and missionary Thomas Chalkley. His son-in-law, merchant Abel James, added its imposing main section around 1776. The building was demolished in 1954; a doorway preserved by the Metropolitan Museum of Art survives from the house.
In their 1912 book Colonial Homes of Philadelphia and Its Neighbourhood, Harold Donaldson Eberlein and Horace Mather Lippincott recorded the hall's tradition of a Little Grey Lady. She was said to appear before a death or an important change affecting the household.
The house also accumulated Revolutionary-era stories. One tells of hungry American troops eating there, followed by British soldiers who arrived and finished what was left.
