Maryland · United States
The flag of Rockville, seat of Maryland's Montgomery County, tells you where you are and how the place got its name. Three blue waves cross it for the water of Rock Creek — the stream that named the town — while red crosses lifted from the Maryland state flag tie this modern suburb back to the Calvert family who founded the colony. The same shield sits at the centre of the city seal.
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| State | Maryland |
|---|---|
| County | Montgomery County (county seat) |
| Incorporated | 10 March 1860 |
| Named after | Rock Creek |
| Flag & seal adopted | 1979 |
| Colours | Red, white and blue |
| Distinction | Four-time All-America City |
Flag of Rockville — the blue waves of Rock Creek and the red Crossland crosses of Maryland
The flag carries the city's shield. Across it run three wavy blue diagonal stripes, separated by two white stripes; on the white are set six red bottony crosses, three to a stripe. The design was adopted in 1979, together with the matching city seal, and published that year in the City of Rockville's newsletter.
According to the city, the palette itself carries a message: the red, white and blue recognise Rockville's standing as a four-time winner of the All-America City Award, the national civic prize. But the two charges — the waves and the crosses — reach much further back, into the name of the town and the founding of Maryland itself.
The blue waves are water, and the water is Rock Creek — the stream from which Rockville takes its name. In effect the flag draws the very thing the town is named after: it is a small piece of visual etymology, the place-name spelled out in heraldry.
The red bottony crosses are borrowed from the Maryland state flag, where they belong to the arms of the Crossland family. The link is genealogical: Alicia Crossland was the mother of George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, who founded the Maryland colony — so his mother's crosses and his own family's black-and-gold together make up the state flag. By taking the Crossland cross onto its own shield, Rockville, a town not chartered until 1860, threads itself back to the seventeenth-century family at the root of Maryland. (The distinctive bottony ending — each arm finishing in three round buds — is the same cross that flies over the whole state.)
Seal of Rockville — the city shield ringed by emblems of Maryland's history and nature
The seal, adopted in the same year, sets the city shield at its centre and rings it with emblems tied to Maryland's colonial history and its natural setting. Among them is a neat heraldic in-joke: a small hawk carrying a tiny shield striped in the black and gold of the Calvert family — the same Calvert colours that fill the Maryland state flag and the flag of Baltimore. Where the flag borrows the Crossland cross, the seal quietly adds the Calvert half of the story too.
Rockville keeps one more link to Maryland's most famous flag. In the churchyard of St. Mary's Catholic Church lie the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, reinterred there in 1975 beside his father and other members of the Key family. Fitzgerald's full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald: he was named for his distant cousin Francis Scott Key, the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner." The anthem that was born of the defence of Baltimore thus has one of its family roots in a Rockville graveyard.
The three wavy blue diagonal stripes stand for water — specifically Rock Creek, the stream that gave Rockville its name. The flag therefore pictures the very feature the city is named after.
They are bottony crosses taken from the Maryland state flag, which draws them from the shield of the Crossland family. Alicia Crossland was the mother of George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, founder of the Maryland colony.
According to the city, the red, white and blue recognise Rockville's standing as a four-time winner of the All-America City Award. The flag and seal were both adopted in 1979.
Both were adopted in 1979, the same era in which Rockville was named an All-America City. The design was published in the City of Rockville newsletter that year.
The seal shows the city shield — the Rock Creek waves and Crossland crosses — surrounded by emblems of Maryland's colonial history and nature, among them a small hawk carrying a tiny shield in the black and gold of the Calvert family.
Last reviewed by the Emblema Mundi editorial team on September 17, 2026.