Benjamin Banneker lived on a farmstead that his parents, Mary and Robert, purchased in 1737 as a 100 acre parcel for 7,000 pounds of tobacco. He moved there as a small child from the Elkridge area with his parents and four sisters, and soon afterward the family built a small cabin on the property. Archaeologists believe this first cabin stood on stone foundation piers, had a small cellar, and probably had a mud and stick chimney. Later, a larger cabin was built with a full stone foundation, a larger cellar, and a stone chimney. Banneker lived in a one room log cabin about 16 by 14 feet, where he cooked in the open hearth or outdoors in warm weather, used the fireplace for winter heat, carried water from a nearby spring, and likely stored food in a root cellar and gathered vegetables from a kitchen garden. At a table in this cabin, he calculated astronomical events, wrote his almanacs, and kept notes in his journals. He cut trees from his farm to build the cabin, filled gaps between the logs with chinking of stones, wood chunks, moss, and clay, covered the walls with daubing made from clay and lime, and whitewashed the inside and outside to seal cracks and keep insects out. In 1796, neighbor Susanna Mason described his home as a lowly one story log dwelling surrounded by an orchard. Recollections shared in 1836 with Martha E. Tyson, daughter of George Ellicott, placed the cabin about a half a mile from the Patapsco River at a never failing spring beneath a large golden willow tree in the midst of his orchard. In the 1980's, archaeologists found evidence of two Banneker cabins and recovered more than 39,000 artifacts. Melted window glass, charred pottery, and ash in the soil indicate that the larger cabin burned in the early 1800's, matching historical accounts that Banneker's cabin burned to the ground during his funeral on October 11, 1806, three days after he died.
