Maxcy Gregg House
1518 Richland Street

At only one-and-a-half stories, this Columbia cottage is modest when compared to the neighborhood's imposing mansions. The home typically is recognized for its associative value with prior residents: Confederate General Maxcy Gregg, the Land family which owned it for almost 100 years, and William Fulmer, the architect responsible for renovating it into offices and helping start a neighborhood trend of adaptive use.

According to a window frame peg inscribe 6-11-41, this house was constructed during the antebellum period and was home to John Davis upon completion. Maxcy Gregg purchased it in 1854 for himself, his mother, and his sisters. The upper half-story was Gregg's bachelor quarters, and, given his intense interest in astronomy, it is not surprising that he had a belvedere built atop the house to serve as an observatory. Though he would go on to fight and die in the Civil War at the battle of Fredericksburg, his sisters spent their lives as missionaries, leading freed slave expeditions to Liberia.

The Land family purchased the home in 1880. It subsequently made significant changes including incorporating the formerly separate kitchen into an addition at the rear of the house and adding three dormers and a broadened, columned porch to give the structure a "Barbados flavor." Most of the façade changes were complete by 1906, by which time Gregg's observatory already had been converted to a space for airing laundry and then torn down. For ninety-two years the Land family occupied the property, but in 1973 it sold it to local developer Michael Mungo, who wanted to demolish the house if it could not be sold and moved off the property within a few months. In December of 1974, William Fulmer bought the house, meticulously restored it, and then proceeded to restore the neighboring American Institute of Architecture (AIA) Cottage, kicking off a trend of quality restoration and adaptive reuse in the area for commercial purposes. The property now is home to the law offices of Harris and Graves, which has carefully maintained Fulmer's work.

Staci Richey and John Sherrer

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