Perry Benson was born August 6, 1757, at Wheatland, a Talbot farm. The life that followed was a soldier's life twice over: first in Washington's war, then, a generation later, on the Miles River when the Royal Navy came for the shipyards at St. Michaels.

He took an ensign's commission in 1776 and a first lieutenancy the same year. County history and later memorials put him with the Maryland Line at Harlem Heights, at Brandywine — where he was wounded — at Germantown, and through the winter of 1777 at Valley Forge, acting captain of the Fifth Maryland. In the Southern campaign a musket ball at Ninety Six, South Carolina, wrecked his left arm. He was sent home. The arm never came back.

The state kept him. He rose through the militia of the mid-Shore — lieutenant colonel, then brigadier in 1798 over Talbot, Caroline, and Dorchester, later major general — and sat in the lower house of the Assembly. When the second war with Britain opened, he was the officer the county already had. He concentrated men at St. Michaels because the yards there had launched privateers, and the British knew it.

The morning of August 10, 1813, came in under a dark cloud. Eleven barges were on the Miles and at Parrott's Point before the battery saw them. Two guns fired. The men at the little fort fell back and lost their muskets. A landing party spiked the pieces and went back to the boats. Then the barges shelled the harbor, and two American batteries on shore answered. Benson had perhaps six hundred men in the town, artillery, infantry, and horse. The infantry stood in order, waiting for a landing that did not come. He wrote afterward that the militia generally behaved well, that some houses were perforated, and that the enemy withdrew. The British had two wounded. The Americans listed no one hurt.

One brick house near the water took a ball that morning. It is still called the Cannonball House. Later tellers put shipwright William Merchant's wife on the stairs, a child in her arms, as the shot rolled through the attic. A second attempt came on August 26. The town held again.

The lanterns are another story, and a later one. Benson's report does not mention them. They enter with family memory in the late nineteenth century and with a recollection printed in 1890. The town's own history now prints the legend and adds the clause that matters: whether true or not. What the morning will bear without the lanterns is simpler. The barges came. The guns answered. The yards were still standing when the British pulled back down the river.

Benson died October 2, 1827, at seventy. The body was moved from Wheatland in 1901. A Maryland Historical Society marker went up in 1965 on Station Road, south of Maryland 33, near Newcomb. Oswald Tilghman's History of Talbot County gave him a long chapter. That book is still the narrative most readers meet.

Sources: Benson's after-action account as printed in Harrison / Oswald Tilghman, History of Talbot County; Town of St. Michaels official history; National Park Service, Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail. The Park Service notes that the cannonade was already in daylight, if overcast, and that H.M. sloop Conflict scored hits. The hanging-lantern story surfaces in the Dodson family and in Thomas Kemp's 1890 recollection.