How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [33]
By Captain GEORGE DIXON6
Meares, meanwhile, returned to active duty in the navy, where he was promoted to commander and with it received a substantial salary. George III proclaimed him a baronet, enabling him to be Sir John Meares. With his military rank, a hereditary title, and his book still being issued and advertised, Meares returned to his hometown of Bath in 1796 and got married. He had achieved all he sought.
With his success, Meares disappeared from the public stage. His death in 1809 went unremarked by any known obituary. Still, his name remains engraved on the map in Meares Island, British Columbia, and Cape Meares, Oregon.
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, MARYLAND, VIRGINIA
BENJAMIN BANNEKER
To Be Brilliant and Black in the New Nation
Benjamin Banneker, the sooty astronomer … is to be associated with our Genevese money-changer [Swiss-born Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin] for the purpose of “correcting” some part of this foreigner’s “procedure.” … The African scholar, if he could correct nothing else, might very easily correct Mr. Gallatin’s English; nay, if Banneker had just arrived from the Gold Coast or the kingdom of Whidau, he would be superior to our imported financier.
—THE PORT-FOLIO, AUGUST 22, 1801
The largest historic site in Washington, DC, seen by more people (albeit unaware) than any other, commemorates the eighteenth-century work of a free African American named Benjamin Banneker. The site is the city’s northern and southeastern boundary line, separating the District of Columbia from Maryland, which was surveyed by Banneker and Andrew Ellicott. Signs at the site, however, currently say only “Welcome to Washington—Cell Phones Illegal While Driving,” without explaining how, in 1791, an African American got hired for such a prestigious assignment.
Banneker was not only a surveyor, which entailed a mastery of mathematics and astronomy. He was also a clockmaker, the author of the most widely published almanac of his day, and even a bit of a poet.1 Mostly, however, he was a tobacco farmer. For the first sixty years of his life, he cultivated his crop in a sparsely populated area west of Baltimore, located between what later became Catonsville and Ellicott City.
Banneker was thirty-one years old when the Ellicott family arrived in the area and met the African American on the adjacent farm. Twelve-year-old George Ellicott was fascinated by the functioning clock Banneker had carved out of wood, based on his observations of a pocket watch. Banneker was likewise fascinated by young Ellicott’s newly learned mathematical insights, and delighted in the books the boy began to lend him. The Ellicotts had moved to Maryland from Pennsylvania, where they were part of a highly respected Quaker family, among whose members were a clockmaker, several surveyors, and an author of an almanac. Given the family’s influence, perhaps it is not surprising that Banneker too became a surveyor and the author of an almanac.
Since slavery was integral to Maryland’s economy, how did Banneker come to be a free man and the owner of a farm? His father, Robert, had been a slave until offered his freedom as an incentive for hard work. He toiled with a vigor that remained even after his liberation and marriage to Mary Bannka. Robert took his wife’s last name because her father, too, had been a slave, whose African name was Bannka. When Bannka had been brought to America, he was purchased by Molly Walsh, who turned out to know a thing or two about involuntary servitude. Molly had been convicted of stealing milk when she was a teenager in England and sentenced to seven years as an indentured servant in the colonies. After serving her period of bondage in Maryland, she farmed a small plot of wilderness land that she was able to rent. In time Molly earned enough to purchase two slaves. She