Maryland's flag looks like it escaped from a jousting tournament, and in a sense it did. The gold-and-black bars and the red-and-white budded crosses are the actual armorial bearings of the Calvert family, the Barons Baltimore who founded the colony in 1634, quartered exactly as a seventeenth-century herald would have them. No other American state flies English heraldry as its flag. That alone would make it distinctive. What makes it remarkable is the second story underneath: the two halves of the design spent the Civil War on opposite sides, and the flag exists in its current form because Maryland decided, a generation later, to sew them back together.
The arms of the Calverts
George Calvert, first Baron Baltimore, was the promoter of the Maryland colony, chartered to his son Cecil in 1632 and named for Queen Henrietta Maria. His coat of arms followed the standard logic of English heraldry. From his father's line came the paly of gold and black with a counterchanged diagonal bend, a design Calvert tradition tied to service in battle. From his mother, Alicia Crossland, an heiress whose arms her descendants were entitled to quarter, came a red and white field divided in four, carrying a cross bottony, a Greek cross whose arms end in trefoil buds, counterchanged so the cross runs white on red and red on white.
Quartered together, the two arms made the banner of the Barons Baltimore, and that banner flew over the proprietary colony. Colonial Maryland used the Calvert colors on its earliest flags and seals. After independence the heraldry fell out of official use, as republican taste preferred eagles and allegories, but it never quite left the state's memory.
Two banners, one war
Maryland in 1861 was a slave state that stayed in the Union, held there by geography, politics, and federal troops. Its people split. Tens of thousands of Marylanders fought for the Union; thousands of others crossed the Potomac to fight for the Confederacy. The state's old heraldry split with them. Unionist Maryland flew the gold and black of the Calvert quarters. Confederate-sympathizing Marylanders adopted the red and white of the Crossland quarters as their badge, and after Lincoln's election in 1860 the "secession colors" appeared on cravats, stockings, and children's clothing in Baltimore. Union authorities in the occupied city treated the colors as contraband sedition. Maryland units in the Confederate army pinned the cross bottony to their caps and jackets as an identifying mark.
So by 1865 the two halves of the old proprietor's banner had come to mean the two halves of a divided state, which is not something any flag designer could have planned.
Reconciliation, stitched
Postwar Maryland faced the problem of reabsorbing men who had fought against the government of their own state. The combined flag emerged in those decades as a quiet piece of symbolic politics: quartering the Union's gold and black with the Confederates' red and white put the two Marylands into one design, each in its old family position, neither erased. A flag of this pattern was flown at the parade marking Baltimore's 150th anniversary on October 11, 1880, the first clearly documented appearance. On October 25, 1888, Maryland National Guard troops carried it at the dedication of the state's monuments at Gettysburg, where Marylanders had fought Marylanders twenty-five years earlier.
The General Assembly made it official on March 9, 1904. The law now sits in the General Provisions Article, section 7-201, of the Maryland Code, which spells out the quarters in heraldic language and fixes the proportions at 2:3.
Rules, ritual, and the cross bottony
Maryland treats its flag with a formality other states reserve for the national colors. A 1945 law specifies the only ornament permitted atop a flagstaff carrying the state flag: a gold cross bottony, the emblem lifted from the Crossland quarters. No other state legislates its finial. The cross bottony has become a freestanding state symbol, appearing on license plates, highway signs, and the uniforms of state agencies.
The flag's specified colors are a strong gold, black, a deep red, and white. In heraldic terms the design is described as: first and fourth quarters, paly of six pieces or and sable, a bend dexter counterchanged; second and third, quartered argent and gules, a cross bottony counterchanged. The blazon is the entire law of the design; there is no seal to redraw, no lettering to update, and the flag has not changed since adoption.
The best flag in America?
Maryland's flag is loud, busy by any ordinary graphic standard, and breaks the flag-design rule that a child should be able to draw it from memory. It also works, and nearly everyone concedes it. The North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey ranked it 4th of 72 state, territorial, and provincial flags, behind New Mexico, Texas, and Quebec, and popular rankings regularly put it first among the states outright. The reason is the other rules it keeps: no words, no seal, colors that carry, and a pattern that cannot be confused with anything else flown anywhere.
Marylanders have responded with a merchandise culture rivaled only by Texas and Chicago. The pattern covers crab mallets, running shorts, football helmets, and rowhouse doors, cropped and repeated far past the point where the heraldry is legible, which is its own kind of proof. A design drawn for a seventeenth-century baron has ended up as the standard test case for what a state flag can be when it never has to explain itself.
References
[1] Maryland Code, General Provisions § 7-201 (state flag). https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Laws/StatuteText?article=ggp§ion=7-201
[2] Maryland Secretary of State, "Flag History." https://sos.maryland.gov/pages/services/flag-history.aspx
[3] Wikipedia, "Flag of Maryland." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Maryland
[4] Preservation Maryland, "Flag Day: History of the Maryland Flag." https://preservationmaryland.org/history-maryland-flag/
[5] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State/Provincial Flag Survey." https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/2001-State-Provincial-Flag-Survey.pdf