Excavated clues tell Columbia family's story

Ceramic plates and baking pans.

Marbles and a toy bank. Spice jars. Medicine jars. Bottle caps.

Chicken bones, safety pins and electrical wiring.

These are among the nearly 60,000 items discovered during a six-year archaeological study of Columbia’s historic Mann-Simons Cottage, the home of a family of black entrepreneurs who lived in Columbia at the turn of the 19th century.

“It tells us the story of Columbia through the lives and experiences of one African-American family,” said Jakob Crockett, the archaeologist at the site. “It gives us a nice, day-to-day picture of what life was like in that time period.”

The archaeological dig comes to an end this week when Crockett and his assistant, Joseph Johnson, begin replacing the dirt over a hole at the corner of Richland and Marion streets.

Crockett began his research in 2005 to earn his doctorate in archaeology at the University of South Carolina. He already has earned his degree, but has stayed at the cottage to continue his work. After he and Johnson finish cataloguing the artifacts, they will write a report on the findings.

Visitors are welcome to visit the site today to get one last look at their work.

One of the things visitors will see is much-sought-after evidence of the original home on the site.

In 2010, an architectural study of the home determined that though it is Celia Mann’s namesake, she never set foot inside. It wasn’t old enough to have been the home of Mann and her husband, Ben Delane, freed slaves from Charleston who moved to Columbia in the late 1830s.

But Crockett and Johnson recently discovered post holes that made the foundation of the original house on the site. Most of the wooden posts had rotted away under the moist soil, but Crockett and Johnson managed to recover a few wooden pieces. The pieces are now wrapped in plastic and waiting to be catalogued.

Mann and Delane had four children. Three moved to Boston. The fourth, Agnes Jackson, remained in Columbia, and it was her family that built the house now known as the Mann-Simons Cottage.

Over the years, the Mann-Jackson-Simons family ran a grocery, a walk-up lunch counter and a boarding house on the site. It was the lunch counter – one of only three such excavated sites in the country – that provided the biggest bonanza of artifacts.

The lunch counter burned in 1909, and the family dug a trash pit to bury its remains. Artifacts found in the trash pit include pans and plates, McCormick spice bottles, olive and pickle jars and chicken bones, an indication of what was on the menu.

Crockett and Johnson also theorize that the family sold dry goods from the lunch counter. They found ammunition, marbles and straight pins mixed in with the restaurant’s remains.

Johnson said theoretical discussions about the lunch counter and its daily operations have been his favorite part of the dig. He imagines the business as an early version of a convenience store where customers could buy a hot meal, a soda and dry goods they needed at home.

“It’s all in this 14-by-14 area that served as a lunch counter,” Johnson said.