Benjamin Banneker 

Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9, 1731 in a small 
town near Baltimore Maryland. The son of Robert and Mary
Banneker. His grandfather, Banna Ka, was a slave born and raised in Africa. His grandmother, Molly Walsh was an indentured servant from England was later sent to Maryland as a servant. After Molly worked 7 years she and 2 other slaves chipped in and bought a farmhouse. One of the 2 slaves was Banna Ka. She ended up falling in love with him and married him. They had numerous children one of them was there daughter Mary. When Mary grew up she bought a slave namedRobert and married him and had a lot of children one of them Benjamin.
 Benjamin grew up on the family farm. The farmhouse was 
known as “Bannaky Springs” because of the fresh water springs on the farm. The family used little dams and holes to control the water from the springs. The free blacks raised good tobacco crops. There wasn’t any schools in the valley for boys to attend so,Grandmother Banneker taught all the grandchildren how to read from her bible. Soon enough though a Quaker school teacher came and opened a school for boys. Which in fact Benjamin attended. There he learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. 
    When Benjamin was 21 a man named Josef Levi let him borrow a pocket watch. This spellbound him. Levi ended up giving the watch to Benjamin. And from this simple thing, it changed his life. He himself invented the first striking clock in America. All from the watch Levi had given him. The striking clock was so accurate that it struck every hour on the hour for the next forty years. This led him to labor on watches, repairing them. He even helped out a acquaintance Joseph Ellicott to construct a compound clock. The Ellicott family let him borrow books on mathematics and astronomy and instruments for screening the stars. He eventually educated himself with complex mathematics and astronomy. In 1791 he was asked by U.S. President George Washington to assist the surveyors laying out the new capital and the District of Columbia. He helped survey the site of the national capital between 1791 and 1793. Without the help of him we might not have a nations capital. He finished the !
capital in 2 days. Drawing out the streets, parks and even the major buildings. 
  Benjamin Banneker published a famous almanac titled “The 
Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and 
Ephemeris”. the manuscript of the first almanac to
Revolutionary leader Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of 
state. With the manuscript, Banneker included a letter in which he protested slavery and disputed Jefferson's claim that blacks were mental mediocre to whites. Abolitionists used the almanacs as proof of the academic capabilities of blacks. It was published from 1792 to 1797. Benjamin was a technical assistant in the scheming the Federal District, now located in Washington D.C. 
        It’s not known exactly when Benjamin Banneker died. 
When I looked it up I got 3 different dates. October 9th, 25th, and the 26th. All in which were in 1806. He was 74. Few memorial traces still exist in the section of Maryland in which he grew up. It wasn’t until recently that the actual sight of Banneker home was discovered. His house coincidentally burned down the day of his passing. In 1980 the U.S. Postal Service issued a postage stamp in his honor.