#DidYouKnow farmer and astronomer Benjamin Banneker made some of the earliest known recordings of the brood of cicadas that emerge every 17 years in Maryland? In 1800 in his Astronomical Journal (housed within the Maryland Center for History and Culture's library collection), he wrote about observing the cicadas, or locusts as he called them, over a span of 51 years of his life. Read his entry here: "The first great Locust year that I can Remember was 1749. I was then about Seventeen years of age when thousands of them came and was creeping up the trees and bushes, I then immagined they came to eat and destroy the fruit of the Earth, and would occation a famine in the land, I therefore began to kill and destroy them, but I soon Saw that my labour was in vain, therefore gave over my pretension. Again in the year 1766, which is Seventeen years after their first appearance to me, they made a Second, and appeared to me to be full as numerous as the first. I then being about thirty four ye...