Flag of Maryland

How to read it

Maryland’s General Provisions Article, § 7-202, describes the flag in heraldic terms. It is divided into quarters. The first and fourth are “a paly of six pieces, or (gold) and sable (black), and a bend dexter counterchanged”: six alternating gold and black vertical bars, crossed by a diagonal band on which the colours are reversed. The second and third are quartered white and red, with a cross bottony counterchanged, a Greek cross whose arms end in trefoils, red on the white quarters and white on the red, as on the shield of the state seal. Section 7-201 makes “the Maryland flag” the State flag, and § 7-203 allows only a gold cross bottony as an ornament on top of its staff, a rule of 1945. The law sets no proportions and no shades. The flag was first flown on 11 October 1880 at a parade in Baltimore for the city’s 150th anniversary, and again at Gettysburg on 25 October 1888 when monuments to Maryland regiments of the Army of the Potomac were dedicated; it was adopted as the State flag by Chapter 48 of the Acts of 1904, effective 9 March 1904.

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Crossland or Mynne?

The Maryland State Archives has named the red and white arms two ways. The 1999 edition of the Maryland Manual said they are the arms of the Mynne family, the family of Anne Calvert, wife of George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, “wrongly identified as the Crossland family in the act creating a State flag”. The current edition says Crossland, the family of George Calvert’s mother, which is the name the flag law of 1904 used.