On the corner of Richland and Marion streets in Columbia sits the Mann-Simons Cottage, raised porch and Tuscan columns facing you. Here a story of family, freedom, and adaptation is visible in its architecture and in the record of ownership. In 1843 Ben DeLane, a freedman, purchased this property for his wife Celia Mann; on Celia's death in 1867 their daughter Agnes Jackson Simons inherited the house and lot.
In the 1870s the earlier hall and parlor house was removed and a 1½ story "cottage style" house was built on the site of the original structure; the surviving cottage was built between approximately 1872 and 1880. Look at the front façade: a raised porch and four Tuscan order columns support the gabled roof, three unevenly spaced dormers puncture the façade, and the house rests on a raised basement. The property remained in the Mann-Simons family until 1970, when the Columbia Housing Authority acquired it.
It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and opened to the public as a historic house museum five years later. The site is notable as a representation of the economic and cultural life of the free Black community in Columbia during the Antebellum and Reconstruction eras. Notice the four Tuscan columns holding up this cottage's gabled roof.