Benjamin Banneker's legacy, contributions to Black history live on in Baltimore County
BALTIMORE -- Baltimore County native Benjamin Banneker's contributions to Black history are stories of resilience, activism, and ingenuity.
Banneker was born on a farm in 1731 in Oella, Maryland. Near the heart of Catonsville, in Baltimore County, are the keys to an impressive legacy at the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum.
"Mr. Banneker, you see his name pop up on different types of buildings, schools, library buildings, etcetera, like this one," said Nicholas Anderson, with the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park & Museum. "It's actually because he's pretty significant in the foundation of the United States of America."
Who is Benjamin Banneker?
The "Banneka" family settled on the land in Oella which historians described as a wild area, yet untapped by the young nation's westward expansion.
"Like even as they called it Baltimore town in 1756ish, were really worried about invasion from the French and the Indigenous allies, so this area would have been largely unsettled and going under periods of cultivation where individuals are coming in and clearing the land planting tobacco," Anderson said.
Historians said Banneker was self-taught, a multi-racial person, whose paternal grandmother was a white British woman who came to America as an indentured servant.
Raised by his parents who were freed slaves, Banneker taught himself math and science, and he was obsessed with astronomy and studying the stars in the sky, thanks to a neighbor down the Patapsco River named George Ellicott, one of three Quaker brothers from Pennsylvania who settled nearby, creating Ellicott Mills, which is now Ellicott City.
"He was innately gifted, and I believe his interest, George Ellicott, introduced him to astronomy, and so he actually creates almanacs charting the stars," said Dr. Ida Jones, an archivist and historian at Morgan State University. "This is the 1700s where he's doing this with very little technology in terms of the telescope and the fancy gadgets that you eventually have by the mid-19th century."
"It's a transformative moment for him because he gets to see some modern technology," Anderson added. "He has access to the mill store but he also gains a friend in George Ellicott. With him being several years younger than Mr. Banneker is actually a standard of how much Mr. Banneker knows, as a self-taught mathematician and that kind of opens up his world."
Banneker died in 1806 at the age of 74.
Brains behind the boundaries of Washington, D.C.
From accurately charting eclipses over the Indian Ocean and London to creating the first known wooden clock in America from scratch, Banneker was a man of many talents, which also included farming and surveying.
In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired George Ellicott's brother – Andrew Ellicott – to survey 100 square miles of land that would become a federal square that we know now as Washington, D.C. Banneker was hired as an assistant surveyor, capitalizing on his brilliance in astronomy to calculate and establish the southwestern parts of our nation's capital.
Today, the southwest boundary stone sits in the middle of a Falls Church, Virginia, neighborhood at Benjamin Banneker Park, as a national historic landmark.
"So you have Silver Spring, Maryland, Falls Church, Alexandria and Seat Pleasant down here," Anderson said. "This territory is kind of swampy, it's an area where there is tidal run-off so you can see what he's working in, and they were hoping that Mr. Benjamin Banneker contributed to turning this big chunk of wilderness into an area where legislation is eventually going to be passed, where people can come and have discourse."
"And he had a photographic memory to remember L'Enfant's plans as well, so had he not remembered those plans, who knows what Washington D.C. would have looked like in terms of its configuration."
Civil rights activism
Banneker was also known for his almanacs which would be dispersed around the nation and eventually overseas with help from the likes of Thomas Jefferson.
Not to be lost in Banneker's brilliance was his activism for civil rights and those still in chains by way of slavery. Banneker wrote a 14-page letter to Jefferson on the attributes of his giftedness.
"And that this one drop of white blood did not make any smarter or less smarter than those enslaved Africans," Jones said.
"This is an individual who has proved that these people are intelligent, not less than," Anderson added.
Banneker and the African American diaspora was always so much more than the boxes America placed them in. Generations later, on that same farm in Oella, his legacy lives on to inspire and contribute to the rich tapestry that is Black history and American history.
