A month ago, the National Park Service unveiled panels documenting the long human history of Jones Point Park. “The hardest part of our work,” said Pam Cressey, a city archeologist involved in the effort, “is deciding what to say within a limited space.” A detail of the panel on astronomer Benjamin Banneker is shown below. (All photos © Erica Bleeg.)

By Erica Bleeg

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,

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