The Maxcy Gregg House, located at 1518 Richland Street in Columbia, is an important surviving example of the city’s antebellum “Columbia Cottage” tradition and is generally dated to circa 1840–1841. The one-and-one-half-story frame residence was constructed as a modest but carefully detailed urban dwelling and was purchased in 1854 by Maxcy Gregg, a prominent Columbia attorney, planter, and political figure who became one of South Carolina’s leading advocates of secession and later served as a Confederate general during the Civil War. The house occupies a raised basement and is five bays wide, with a side-gabled roof and weatherboard siding. Its restrained scale and symmetrical composition reflect the distinctive Columbia Cottage form that developed during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, combining vernacular construction with elements of the Greek Revival vocabulary. The central entrance is particularly notable for its elliptical fanlight and tabernacle-style surround, while six-over-six sash windows feature fluted surrounds and corner blocks.

The house underwent a significant enlargement and remodeling in 1906, when the original one-bay porch was extended across the façade and three dormers were added to the front roof slope. The dormers, particularly the central pedimented dormer with paired casement windows, give the otherwise restrained cottage a more elaborate early twentieth-century appearance. An original rooftop belvedere was subsequently removed, but the building retains much of its historic character, including its raised basement, weatherboard exterior, classical entrance treatment, historic windows, and traditional porch. After the Land family acquired the property in 1880, it remained associated with the family for nearly a century. More recently, the house underwent an extensive historic rehabilitation that restored significant interior and exterior features, including heart-pine floors, plaster walls, high ceilings and moldings, wavy glass windows, and the porch. The Maxcy Gregg House is a locally landmarked property and remains an important component of Columbia’s historic residential landscape, illustrating both the city’s antebellum domestic architecture and its continuing evolution through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.