Next paddle 8.9 miles east to Ben's Creek. The creek is located just past Battle Creek and Jack Bay. If you see a new huge beautiful brown house on top of a hill, you are in the right place. At the mouth of the creek is the location of a former community of freed slaves. Now the houses are in ruins. Since the community no longer exists, there is nothing to see besides where the former community was located. Blanche Wilson, born in 1903, was the historian of the community of Ben's Creek. Her grandparents, all former slaves, were among the original founders of the community in the late 1860's. There were once 19 houses in the community, 16 of them log or partially log; the others were frame.

James Harrod, a former slave of the Hellen family, was a founder of the community. Harrod's wife, Cecilia Golden Harrod, had been a slave on the nearby Parran plantation. Deeds show James Wilson, Sr., Blanche Wilson's paternal great-grandfather, was the first freed man to settle into Ben's Creek. He had been a slave of the Turners, who also lived nearby in the community of Wallville. He bought 34.25 acres in 1866 on Ben's Creek where it flowed into the Patuxent River. According to the census, Wilson was born in 1813, and his wife Matilda was born in 1819. He was able to raise $962 to meet the asking price for the property. Wilson perhaps saved some money during slavery, and supplemented this with his earnings as a waterman and farmer. James Wilson, Jr., had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and after his discharge he returned to Calvert County and bought land adjacent to his father's.

At the same time other black families were settling in Ben's Creek, too. Lewis Bourne purchased nine and three quarters acres in 1869 from the Hellen family, and in 1874 acquired 20 more acres from them. In 1870, Peter Gross purchased six acres from the Hellens. In 1873, James Harrod, Blanche Wilson's maternal grandfather born in 1840, purchases six acres for $35 per acre. In 1884, Louis and Lidia Brooks purchased 3.26 acres and 29.5 acres of land from the Hellens, but like the Harrods, the Brookses were living on the land prior to that time, in their own log house.

According to George McDaniel's book, Hearth and Home, most freed men and women were destitute and were locked into a tenant-landlord relationship that resembled peonage. However, McDaniel also said a significant few were able to make enough money from farming, fishing, crabbing, oystering and jobs in the cities to buy land during Reconstruction, even at high prices. This feat was accomplished without credit. Deeds show that they paid the price in full and that there were no loans or mortgages. McDaniel also notes that Ben's Creek revealed the relationship that the settlers must have had with the whites that lived in the area. Whites at that time would not have sold their land to just any blacks. The blacks that purchased land lived in the vicinity and were known and probably accepted by the landowners. Also, whites did not worry too much about the amount of blacks that purchased land because the blacks were only buying a small portion of the large farms of hundreds of acres owned by the ruling whites.

The community of Ben's Creek literally had to build their community from the ground up. According to Miss Wilson, her grandparents said that they cleared the land of trees for their fields and homes, and used the timber to build their houses, outbuilding and fences. Most of their first houses were log, because that was the type they had built during slavery, and they had the necessary skills; furthermore, logs were the only inexpensive building material available. Families worked cooperatively to help one another. Miss Wilson recalled that house building was to some extent a biracial effort. She said that the majority of the people were black, but there were one or two white neighbors in the vicinity that also helped. Miss Wilson, the last surviving member of Ben's Creek Community, passed away sometime in the early nineties.