MoCo’s Flag and Seal
Lilly Moore Stone, c. 1945
In 1936, Montgomery County matriarch and champion of history Lilly C. Stone was invited to bring her county’s flag with her to the annual convention of the State Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). To her horror, she discovered there was not a flag nor any symbolic iconography to represent Montgomery County, which had existed at that point for 160 years. All extant Maryland counties had been assigned colors or shields by the governor in 1694—except, of course, for the present-day counties of Frederick, Washington, and Montgomery, which didn’t exist until the 18th century. Frederick was carved out of Prince George’s County in 1748, and the other two were subsequently formed in 1776 from Frederick County, named for General George Washington and General Richard Montgomery respectively. In 1775, Montgomery had led Continental troops in an effort to take Quebec, and was killed on the battlefield as one of young America’s first martyrs. His heroism inspired the creation of counties named for him in at least thirteen states, the first being Maryland (five more prominent Montgomery place names in the country have unclear provenance or were named for someone else). At her discovery that no flag for Montgomery County had ever been established, Mrs. Stone immediately set about to rectify the oversight.
Elements of the original seal, as depicted on the county flag, 1936
Montgomery County’s Chapter of the DAR, named for the General’s wife Janet Livingston Montgomery, formed a “flag committee,” to be chaired by Stone, assisted by Mrs. Peyton Whalen and Mrs. Hewitt Griggs Robinson, and charged with designing the county’s new flag, a task which they accomplished in only two weeks. Bristling with pride in her native county, Stone researched the heraldry connected with the name Montgomery (she references “Burke’s Peerage” as her source) but possibly misunderstood the nature of family crests. According to the College of Arms, “Coats of arms belong to specific individuals and families and there is no such thing as a coat of arms for a family name” [emphasis added]. Though we do not know her research methodology, Stone identified a coat of arms for the surname Montgomery and either decided to claim it or merely assumed it applied to General Richard Montgomery, about whom not much was known at the time, in fairness.
The crest Stone presented featured a shield divided by a crossed spear and sword (a depiction of St.Andrew’s Cross), the four sections representing loyalty, truth, courage, and prowess. The quarters were decorated alternately with fleur-de-lis (denoting French ancestry) and rings with blue stones (indicating both royal favor and the family’s fealty to the sovereign). Atop a red “cap of maintenance” adorned with ermine (a symbol carried by a monarch during coronation), was a hand sheathed in armor holding a broken spear, which is thought to represent a trophy awarded the family for victory over an enemy. Around the edges, trefoils symbolized hope, joy, and victory, while the presence of the Red Hand of Neill indicated the rank of baronet. This icon was rooted on an old tale about Scottish marauders who, while crossing the Northern Channel towards an unclaimed Ireland, agreed the first of them to touch flesh to the opposing shore would be king. Neill, seeing another boat about to reach the destination ahead of his, cut off his own arm and tossed it onto the land, achieving his kinghood. James I assigned the “Red Hand of Neill” as the symbol of a baronet when he created the rank in 1611.
Montgomery County’s DAR flag committee proposed the following design for the flag based on Stone’s research: the coat of arms she had identified, painstakingly copied from the peerage book, should appear centered on a silk field of Maryland yellow, with the words “Montgomery County, Maryland” above it, and the Montgomery family motto, “Gardez Bien” (Guard Well) below. On either side would be the dates 1776 (the year the county was formed) and 1936 (the year the flag was adopted). They took their design to the Maryland State Senate for approval late in the year, though awkwardly, due to lack of time in that session, it was not approved until early 1937. Stone and her committee provided the colored silks to construct the prototype, which was made to order by the Copeland Flag Company of Washington. However, it remained the only example of the flag in existence for the next eight years.
Montgomery County’s new flag, flying from a county building (location unknown)
Rationing of supplies during World War II likely had a hand in the delay of production, but possibly the confluence of Mrs. Stone’s attention to history was also a factor. In 1944, the same year she founded the Montgomery County Historical Society, three more of the DAR-designed county flags were finally obtained from the Copeland Co., for the purpose of installation at county facilities. Due to a miscommunication, two of those flags were created with the date 1944 on the right-hand side rather than the originally intended date of 1936. Regardless, Stone and the DAR planned flag-raising ceremonies on May 3, at county buildings in Rockville, Bethesda, and Silver Spring. After that brief resurgence of attention for the flag, it seemed to disappear from the public consciousness again rather quickly. Only five of these flags were ever created; the last was stitched in 1954 for the Montgomery County Historical Society, by which time the flags from the Bethesda and Silver Spring facilities had disappeared—both physically and from institutional memory. “An employee who went to work in the Silver Spring County building in 1945 says he never remembers a county flag,” wrote the Sentinel in a 1955 article. The prototype from 1936 remained in Lilly Stone’s possession, and Rockville’s flag, frequently and somewhat casually loaned out to civic organizations on a regular basis, was seemingly reclaimed around that time for its own protection, though its location today is unknown. Silver Spring’s missing flag resurfaced in 2013 when it was donated to Montgomery History by a couple who thought it might have once flown over the fire station there.
Regardless of the apparent lack of enthusiasm for displaying the flag, the Montgomery iconography designed by Stone and the DAR had been sanctioned for official county use since its approval in 1937. The Montgomery County Code of 1937, 1939, 1947, 1950, and1955 all refer to the specifications of the flag and coat of arms. The latter was featured on all government stationery, uniforms, and police and emergency vehicles into the early 1970s. Shortly after the election of James Gleason as the first County Executive, he and a delegation of county officials visited England for a National Association of Counties study tour in the summer of 1971. At each formal function, they proudly presented British officials with gifted items featuring the Montgomery seal. This raised more than a few eyebrows in a country where heraldry is taken very seriously, and the county men (particularly history-buff Gleason) received the message from polite but skeptical Brits that they might want to confirm the authenticity of the emblem and/or examine the propriety of its use.
At left: A house in Montgomery Square (Bethesda), built in 1963, incorporated the original Montgomery County seal on its doorknocker.
Richard Montgomery’s actual family crest, as published in a Harper’s Magazine article by Louise Livingston Hunt, 1885.
Meanwhile, members of the Montgomery County Historical Society had acquired a copy of Harpers New Monthly Magazine, in which an article on General Richard Montgomery, penned by Louise Livingston Hunt (a niece of Montgomery’s wife Janet), appeared in the February,1885 issue. Hunt included a drawing she labeled “Montgomery Arms” which featured the familiar quarters populated with fleur-de-lis and rings, as well as the armored fist clutching a broken spear. But other elements of the coat of arms championed by Mrs. Stone back in 1936, such as the red cap, crossed weaponry, and the hand of Neill, were absent. Most surprising was the motto ribboned below, which was not “Gardez Bien,” but a less appealing motto reading “Patrie Infelici Fidelis” (stay loyal to your unhappy country). Surely a member of the Montgomery family wouldn’t include the wrong heraldry and motto in her tribute to her fallen relative? MCHS president Gerry Wooldridge, who also worked for the County Executive, fretted over the discrepancy and began her own quiet inquiries over the next couple years.
With the county’s bicentennial on the horizon and various newly-created commissions ramping up planning efforts already, legislation was proposed in 1972 to amend the county flag and seal, including small corrections to the text and some details of the flag’s description. It occurred to someone on the County Council to reach out to the Historical Society for approval of the language. When she received the inquiry letter from the Council Secretary David Collier, Wooldridge replied relating her recent concerns over the authenticity of the coat of arms, adding to the sense of impropriety felt by county men during the British tour a year earlier. Aware now from two separate sources of the need for verification of the coat of arms, county officials began a long process of investigation that for many years yielded few results.
[add image: letter from Collier]
Over the entirety of 1973, Collier (now the Montgomery County Assistant Chief Administrative Officer) wrote numerous letters requesting information: to the National Genealogical Society, to the DAR in Rhinebeck, NY (where the Montgomerys had lived), to St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City (where Montgomery is buried), to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to the Department of the Army’s Institute of Heraldry, to the Library of Congress, to the British and Irish embassies, and to a dozen of the other Montgomery Counties in the U.S. named for Richard Montgomery. Of all these inquiries, only two yielded useful results: a librarian at the LDS Genealogical Library wrote back that the coat of arms presented by Lilly Stone and the flag committee in 1936 was that of Sir Henry (Hugh) Cunningham Montgomery, of whom little was known other than his lack of any relation to General Richard Montgomery. Also, the British embassy wrote to suggest the county should contact the College of Arms, the governing body that controlled the use and authenticity of heraldry in England. Accordingly, Donald Courtney, from the County Executive’s Office, reached out to Mr. J.P. Brooke-Little, the Richmond Herald of Arms for the College of Arms in London.
Brooke-Little replied in December 1973 that he could perform research on the coat of arms provided for a fee of $50. He also informed Courtney that the depiction of a coat of arms granted to an individual was proprietary to that individual and to his family line. To co-opt it for use on a flag or as a symbol of a government entity was strictly against the rules of heraldry, akin to copyright infringement. Instead of verifying the current coat of arms, he suggested “devisal” (apparently an artifice invented c. 1960 specifically for American towns desiring to use British arms to which they were not eligible). In this arrangement, the College of Arms would create a new design that incorporated only extracted elements of a coat of arms, that could be then legally owned by the client. Not only would devisal prevent unauthorized use of the image, but it would be infinitely more proper, as stated by Brooke-Little: “What would be wrong, in my opinion, and in that of any armorist, would be to use the complete coat undifferenced.” A few weeks later, Courtney sent the check, and receipt was acknowledged in March. Nothing more was heard from Mr. Brooke-Little for nearly a year.
When they did hear from him, the news was not great. Richard Montgomery had not been eligible to bear arms (meaning, carry a heraldic shield) because his ancestral line did not confer that right upon him. The red cap, the Hand of Neill, and the crossed weaponry all denoted the arms of a baron with connections to royalty—none of which applied to the Irish immigrant Richard Montgomery. Sir Hugh, the rightful heir of the coat of arms in question, was of no relation to General Richard, and furthermore, his coat of arms was created in 1808—32 years after Montgomery County’s namesake had died.
The new coat of arms, as devised by the Kings of Arms, London.
In March of 1975, Courtney wrote to request that Brooke-Little proceed with devisal, as suggested. The non-negotiable sum for the endeavor was around $1,500 ($9,000 in today’s money) and Courtney sent the check in June of 1975, along with approval for the devisal of a coat of arms for Montgomery County from Governor of Maryland Marvin Mandel. With the bicentennial year fast approaching, the County wished to have the flag and seal issue resolved as soon as possible… but British heraldry hurries for no one. Brooke-Little advised that devisal could take a year or more to accomplish, what with “prayers” and permissions to seek from various peerage officials. One can detect a whiff of eye-rolling in the correspondence from the College of Arms, as heraldic conference dates to the 11th century and before. A small American county’s insistence on the importance of its paltry 200th anniversary was perhaps understandably comical to representatives of an entity formed in the 15th century that counted its relevance in multiples of a thousand years.
The rest of that year was spent in correspondence with Brooke-Little, regarding both the terms and the design of the new iconography. The final design of the county seal, as approved by the three-man committee known as the Kings of Arms, still featured the fleur-de-lis and rings from Richard Montgomery’s family crest, as well as the armored hand clutching a broken arrow. In place of the red cap of maintenance, a crown of castle-like bricks evoked the boundaries of local government. Added were two flags–one yellow, one black–taken from the Maryland coat of arms to symbolize the county’s relationship to that State. Removed were the incorrect elements of the Hand of Neill, the trefoils, and the crossed spear and sword, as well as several colors; the final version of the coat of arms has only three.
Montgomery County’s new flag, adopted in 1976
The new flag also included depictions of the fleur-de-lis and rings with an indented line indicating the local government’s borders, and echoed the Maryland state flag with its distinct four quarters. The design was also more appropriate according to vexillology (the science of flags) which dictates simplicity of design with distinct colors in stark contrasts and utilization of symbols rather than words or dates. The new designs were presented at a public hearing on June 22, 1976, and were approved for eventual adoption by the County Council. Bureaucracy delayed that, however, as the old legislation had to be repealed before the new bill could be passed. Though adoption prior to the county’s anniversary on September 6, 1976 would have been preferable, no councilmembers wished to designate approval as “emergency legislation” to achieve that deadline. (As one councilmember remarked, “I defy my colleagues to call this an emergency.”) The legislation to replace the old flag and seal involved three different bills, two enacted July 6, 1976 (one amusingly numbered Bill 17-76) and the third, to approve the new flag and seal, was enacted October 5, 1976, but did not take effect until early 1977. County Executive James Gleason and Council President John Menke both wrote letters of appreciation to the Montgomery County Historical Society for their consistent support for the project over many years.
The official county seal, adopted in 1976.
Montgomery County’s new flag was raised on county property for the first time on December 30, 1976, the 201st anniversary of Richard Montgomery’s death. As for the outdated seal emblazoned on county vehicles, uniforms, and paper products, it took many years to phase out. Material was not immediately discarded or reprinted, but continued to be used until replacement was necessary, at which point the new seal was applied. In this way, that era of county government can be viewed as technically proper, yet practically frugal.
The motto “Gardez Bien,” though initially intended to be changed, remains the motto for our Montgomery County, even though it was not the one used by Richard Montgomery’s family. Usually translated to “Guard Well” the Latin can also be interpreted as “Serve Well” or—with a more sinister nuance—“Be Careful,” which connotes a warning to maintain vigilant care of important and valuable assets, whether physical or conceptual.