In 1683, 17-year-old Molly Walsh sat in a barn in England, milking a difficult cow. Earlier that month, this same cow had kicked over her pail, causing the milk to spill. Cook had told her that if she allowed this to happen again she would be arrested for stealing the master's milk.

The cow kicked. The milk spilt. Molly Walsh was arrested and taken before the court, where she was sentenced to hang for stealing. But no one was hanged who could read the Bible, and Molly could read. The court offered her a Bible. Molly read aloud to save her life.

She would not hang. Instead, she was exiled to America, carrying her Bible with her, sold for her crime into seven years of indentured servitude.

Molly Walsh worked for a tobacco farmer on the east coast of Maryland. She worked from daybreak to sunset, planting and weeding. She became strong enough to control a team of oxen as they pulled the plow. When she wasn't working for her master, she sewed and nursed ill people to earn money of her own.

After seven years, she was free. Her former master gave her, as the law required, an ox and harness, a plow, a cart, two hoes, a bag each of tobacco seed and seed corn, clothing, and a gun. Molly Walsh turned west, and staked a claim in the Maryland wilderness.

A woman staking a claim alone was unusual, but her neighbors helped her build her one-room cabin, helped her plant and harvest her first tobacco crop. Molly realized she couldn't run the farm alone. So she bought two slaves fresh off a slave ship, one a tall black man who looked her in the eye as she bid on him. She talked to him using her hands and learned his name: Bannaka, to change later to Bannaky.

Molly Walsh took the slaves into her house. They shared their meals. She taught them about farming tobacco and other American plants, and Bannaky taught her how to dig irrigation ditches and how to rotate crops, which he had learned as a boy in Africa. Together they cleared the trees off of her stake.

Molly freed both of her slaves after her land was cleared. She and Bannaky were married by a traveling minister. Even though interracial marriage violated Maryland law, their neighbors respected both Molly and Bannaky and never filed a complaint against them. Over the years, they built the little stake into a prosperous hundred-acre farm and had four daughters.

Bannaky died when the girls were still young, long before their first grandchild was born to their oldest daughter, Mary, and her husband, Robert, also a freed slave. Robert had no last name, so took Mary Bannaky's. Molly Bannaky wrote her first grandchild's name in her Bible. The baby's name was Benjamin. His grandmother taught him and his brothers to read and write using her Bible, and told him stories of his grandfather. When a Quaker schoolteacher started a school for boys nearby, Benjamin enrolled. The teacher changed the spelling of his last name to Banneker.

We wouldn't know Molly Walsh's story today if her grandson hadn't grown up to be a renowned scientist and mathematician. Many, many women's stories remain unknown. Without them, even though we don't know them, we wouldn't have a country.