Charles Alexander Warfield was a Maryland Son of Liberty who took part in the burning of the tea ship Peggy Stewart at Annapolis on October 19, 1774. The protest challenged British taxation and authority shortly before open war. Warfield later served as a major in the Elkridge Battalion of Maryland militia, supporting the Patriot military effort.

The Peggy Stewart affair began when the brig arrived at Annapolis carrying tea on which the unpopular duty had been paid. Local pressure focused on shipowner Anthony Stewart, whose decision appeared to accept Parliament’s taxing authority. On October 19, 1774, a public meeting demanded a dramatic remedy. Stewart burned his vessel, cargo, and tea at the harbor, an event often called the Annapolis Tea Party. Warfield, a physician and prominent activist from the Patapsco region, participated in the resistance movement surrounding the destruction and became associated with its militant edge. The protest occurred after the Boston Tea Party and during enforcement of the Coercive Acts, when Maryland committees were organizing boycotts and political discipline. Warfield later served in the Maryland militia, whose local defensive and administrative duties supported the broader war effort. The marker commemorates a person rather than the Annapolis waterfront where the ship burned, connecting his home region to the escalating cycle of protest that preceded open fighting.

Interpreting this location requires separating the physical place from the larger history attached to it. A marker may stand beside a changed road, later building, grave, overlook, or vanished structure; it does not mean that every associated event occurred on the exact modern footprint. The value of the site is that it anchors documentary history in a landscape visitors can still encounter. It also broadens the Revolution beyond famous declarations and set-piece battles. Military campaigns depended on transportation, intelligence, credit, supply, local government, and civilian cooperation, while communities experienced imprisonment, property loss, divided allegiance, and the demands of passing armies. Later generations selected particular people and episodes for commemoration, sometimes simplifying uncertainty in the process. A careful reading preserves the marker’s core claim while distinguishing established fact, reasonable geographic context, and later tradition. Seen in that way, this place contributes a specific local chapter to the wider transformation from imperial protest through war and into the creation and remembrance of the United States.

The surviving association is therefore most useful when treated as evidence of how national events reached particular communities and how those communities later chose to preserve the connection. Its limitations are equally instructive, reminding visitors that responsible place-based history must acknowledge altered landscapes, incomplete records, and the difference between contemporary evidence and later commemoration.