Sellers Hall — Upper Darby's Oldest Home

Sellers Hall, built around sixteen eighty-four, was among the earliest homes in what is now Upper Darby, constructed for Samuel Sellers and his bride Anna Gibbons. The Sellers family went on to become one of Pennsylvania's most notable dynasties of science and engineering, with generation after generation contributing to mechanical arts and natural philosophy.

Most remarkably, the hall was the birthplace of John Sellers, a founding member of the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States. In seventeen sixty-nine, Sellers served on the select committee that observed the transit of Venus across the sun, a precision astronomical observation that helped scientists worldwide calculate the Earth's distance from the sun. That a family home on this tract produced such a legacy says something about the remarkable intellectual ferment of colonial Pennsylvania.