The early spring day was perfect for a pilgrimage to visit the stone house, by the Ellicott City flour mill, where Martha Ellicott Tyson, an illustrious Maryland Quaker, was born and raised 200 years ago.

The writer and activist's s literary presence as the first biographer of African-American astronomer and surveyor Benjamin Banneker has never been more alive, with a new biography of Banneker being published this week that draws on her pioneering work.

Samuel Hopkins, an 85-year-old Baltimore gentleman, talks about "Martha" as fondly as if she were in the living room -- which, in a way, she is. A portrait of her as a young lady graces one wall.

Yesterday, Hopkins and his cousin, Jim Clark, made themselves comfortable in the old Ellicott family homestead by the Patapsco River, and told well-traveled tales about their great-great-grandmother in soft Southern accents.

Tyson's life story was intertwined with that of Banneker, who was befriended and mentored by her father and whose farm was only a mile up the hill during her girlhood.

Hopkins and Clark, 80, a farmer and former state senator from Howard County, had a lively exchange about why their ancestor was recently inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame.

Tyson's biography of Banneker, "A Sketch of the Life," was published in 1854, decades after Banneker's death. Had it not been for her, the prodigiously talented man who was a beekeeper, scientist and a surveyor of the District of Columbia might well have been lost to history.

"Biographers can make you or kill you," Hopkins said. "They're very important."

One scene from her book reveals that Tyson had a way with words: "We found the venerable stargazer under a wide spreading pear tree, laden with delicious fruit; he came forward to meet us and bade us welcome to his lowly dwelling. In one corner of the room was suspended a clock of his own construction."

The art of biography itself was rather a new thing then. What Tyson did was revolutionary, if not radical, for her time: writing about the life of a free black man in the age of slavery.

Her legacy remains relevant: The Maryland Historical Society is publishing a new hardback edition of "The Life of Benjamin Banneker: The First African-American Man of Science," by Silvio A. Bedini, which draws on her book.

Tyson's husband, Nathan Tyson, was a son of Maryland's best-known abolitionist, Elisha Tyson. Her father, George Ellicott, entertained Indian chiefs in the house where her descendants sat, which was built in 1789.

The cousins are happy to remind you -- practically completing each other's sentences -- that there were plenty of other things worth knowing about their great-great-grandmother.

"She raised 10 children to maturity, quite a feat," Clark said.

"She was a powerfully strong woman. She spoke at Quaker meeting all the time," Hopkins said.

"She was the driving force to get the job done," said Clark, speaking of the founding of Swarthmore College near Philadelphia in 1864, one of the country's first co-educational colleges.

If there is anything Tyson stood for, Hopkins said, it was common ground without regard to race, color or creed.

"She's still relevant for these times, with all the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. She didn't believe in loyalty to specific groups."

Pub Date: 3/31/99