Mann-Simons Cottage

Front: This cottage, built before 1850, with alterations and additions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was the home of Celia Mann (1799-1867) and her husband Ben Delane, among the few free blacks living in Columbia in the two decades before the Civil War. Mann, born a slave in Charleston, earned or bought her freedom in the 1840s and moved to Columbia, where she worked as a midwife. Reverse: Three Baptist churches (First Calvary, Second Calvary, and Zion) trace their origins to services held in the basement of this house. After Mann’s death her daughter Agnes Jackson (d. 1907) lived here; descendants of Agnes Jackson’s second husband Bill Simons owned the house until 1960. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and has been a museum since 1977.