Selma Mansion

Selma is the mansion the Revolution's general built and his sons made a dynasty. Andrew Porter was a founder of the Continental Marines — the forerunner of the Corps — and Surveyor General of Pennsylvania, and he built the Federal-style house in 1794 around the smaller structure he'd bought in 1786. His sons raised there became a governor of Pennsylvania, a governor of Michigan Territory, a Secretary of War, and a founder of Lafayette College — the house that produced the men who ran the state.

The families that followed kept the house in the same register — the Knoxes and the Fornances, the congressmen and the agricultural-society presidents, the relatives of Mary Todd Lincoln's parents, for nearly two centuries. Ruth Ryder Fornance was the last — she died in 1982 and willed the mansion to the state, the county, the borough; none would take it. The contents were auctioned — the rumored crates of unopened Civil War uniforms included — and the Norristown Preservation Society bought the empty house for forty thousand dollars in installments.

The haunting is the town's — the paranormal investigators have worked the house, the psychic fairs are fundraisers, the third-floor cabinet doors are attributed to the Knox children who died there in the Victorian era. The preservation society that saved it runs the ghost tours because the ghost tours are what bring the crowds — the mansion kept alive by the haunting that funds its preservation.

Selma is the archive's dynasty file — the house of the Marine-founder general whose sons governed two states, left to a public that wouldn't take it, saved by the preservation society that uses the ghosts to keep the doors open.