Benjamin Banneker Museum in Catonsville, Maryland

Benjamin Banneker Museum in Catonsville, Maryland

In 1731, Benjamin Banneker, the descendant of a Wolof prince turned slave who later married his enslaver after manumission, was born free and raised on the family homestead in rural Maryland. Despite little formal education (only a few weeks at a Quaker school), Banneker displayed a voracious appetite for knowledge, particularly mathematics and astronomy, and applied his aptitude for the formal and physical sciences into authoring almanacs and b…