Andrew Ellicott (450)

Andrew Ellicott (24 January 1754–20 August 1820) was a surveyor, a mathematician, an astronomer, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1785. Ellicott was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and as a young man moved to Baltimore County, Maryland where his father, APS Member Joseph Ellicott, and his uncles established a milling community. He developed an interest in mathematics and astronomy as a young man, both in school and by working with his father to construct clocks. After briefly serving in the Maryland militia at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, his surveying work began in 1784 with a commission to determine the southern boundary of the state of Pennsylvania. He eventually surveyed the state’s northern and western boundaries as well. In 1791, President George Washington appointed Ellicott to conduct a survey of the ten square miles of land that would eventually become the Washington D.C., a project he carried out with the assistance of Benjamin Banneker, a free African-American mathematician and astronomer. In 1796, Washington commissioned Ellicott to survey the boundary between Spanish-owned Florida and the United States. At the end of the War of 1812, Ellicott served as an astronomer on a delegation tasked with determining boundary lines specified in the Treaty of Ghent. His prominence in his field led to his nomination for the post of United States surveyor general, a position he declined, and to his appointment in 1802 as the secretary of the Pennsylvania Land Office. Ellicott was an educator throughout his life: he briefly taught mathematics at Baltimore Academy beginning in 1785 and, at the end of his life, was a professor of mathematics at West Point. Ellicott became a member of the National Institute of France in 1808 and a member of the Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts of Albany in 1815. (ANB)