In Alexandria, Virginia, just south of a wharf where at low tide great egrets feed, there is a 40-acre park on a small peninsula that since colonial times has been called Jones Point. Recently, I followed a dirt path into a grove of trees to explore, stopping at what the National Park Service calls an “interpretive wayside panel,” one of those ubiquitous educational plaques scattered throughout America’s parks. I was surprised to find a name I hadn’t seen in years: Benjamin Banneker.
As I walked and read the other half-dozen panels scattered throughout the park, each attempting to capture a different era of the peninsula’s history, I wondered how Banneker came to be remembered there. Banneker’s panel pictures two men, one white and peering into the lens of his surveying instrument, and one black, looking into the same distance with his naked eye, pencil and paper in hand. The man with the gadgetry is Major Andrew Ellicott, charged with surveying the D.C. boundary and based in Jones Point, the panel explains, while “on-site measurements and round-the-clock astronomical calculations were conducted by Benjamin Banneker, a free black, self-taught in math and astronomy.” The pair began work on Jones Point in 1791, after President Washington declared that the United States capital must be moved from Philadelphia to its present location.
Read more at the Wilson Quarterly.