Mann-Simons Cottage
1403 Richland Street

The Mann-Simons Cottage has statewide significance as one of only a few houses in South Carolina once owned by free blacks in antebellum days and now preserved as historic house museums. Celia Mann and her descendents owned the house from the mid-nineteenth century until 1970.

Probably built originally as a one-room house on the corner of Marion and Richland streets in Columbia in 1825 or 1830, the cottage evolved over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rooms, dormers and porches were added and the basement was enclosed.

Celia Mann was born into slavery in 1799 in Charleston. It is unknown how she gained her freedom. According to family legend, she walked from Charleston to Columbia where she earned a living as a midwife. It is unknown when she came to live at the cottage, but recent evidence places her at the property as early as 1844. She was instrumental in the founding of First Calvary Baptist Church, which originally met in the basement of the cottage.

Celia Mann had four daughters, but in her will she left the majority of her property and the cottage to Agnes Jackson, her youngest daughter, who lived there with her family until her death in 1907. Agnes' second husband, Bill Simons, was a member of the well-known Joe Randall Band. The house passed to Charles Simons and his wife Amanda Green Simons following Agnes Jackson's death. Bernice Robinson Connors, Amanda Green Simons' niece, inherited the cottage in 1960 and sold it to the Columbia Housing Authority. A grassroots movement in 1970 helped preserve the cottage as an historic site.

The collections in the cottage reflect the entrepreneurial spirit of free blacks. In the Mann-Simons family were bakers, tailors, seamstresses, and musicians, and in the 20th century, educators. An exhibition presents information on Celia Mann and her descendents, the restoration of the cottage, and the archaeological excavation at the site.

Suggested Reading

• The Mann-Simons House Web site
• The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Herbert G. Gutman, New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
• South Carolina, A History, Walter Edgar, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.
• Black Slave Owners, Larry Koger, Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 1985.
• A World in Shadow, Marina Wiramanayake, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973.
• The Many Faces of Slavery, Alexia Jones Helsley and Patrick J. McCawley, Columbia, SC: Department of Archives and History, 1999.