Mann-Simons Cottage

The Mann-Simons Cottage is a historic house located at the corner of Richland and Marion streets in Columbia, South Carolina. Ben DeLane, a freedman, purchased the property for his wife Celia Mann in 1843; daughter Agnes Jackson Simons inherited the house and lot upon Celia's death in 1867. 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 property remained in the Mann-Simmons family until 1970, when it was acquired by the Columbia Housing Authority. The site 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.

The surviving "cottage style" house was built between approximately 1872 and 1880. The front façade features a raised porch and four Tuscan order columns supporting the gabled roof. Other notable features include three unevenly spaced dormers along the façade and a raised basement. Several additional structures that once stood on the property, including a grocery and a second, smaller hall and parlor house on Marion Street, no longer stand.