 | |
| Use |  |
|---|---|
| Proportion | 2:3 |
| Adopted | 1694 |
The Flag of Somerset County, Maryland, United States, consists of a flag of Great Britain with the head of a Native American in the center. The flag was adopted in 1694 after the county received a Royal Warrant from King William III of England to use the Union Jack as its flag. That flag was later adopted by the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. [1]
Somerset County was founded in the Province of Maryland in 1666 and was named after Mary Somerset, the sister-in-law of Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. [2] The county did not have a flag initially. In 1693, Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, commissioned the creation and design of a flag for the county. [3] [4] The following year, King William III of England granted Somerset County a Royal Warrant to use the "King's Colours" as their county flag. [1] The King's Colours became the flag of Great Britain in 1707 but the Kings of England had used it as a personal flag to symbolise the personal Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland. [1] The Indian in the center represented the local Native Americans who had a large number of settlements in the Somerset County area. [5] [6]
On the year of the flag's adoption, the colonists in Somerset County started to use it as a naval ensign. [5] In the following years, it appears that the flag fell into disuse. In 1958, members of the Olde Princess Anne Days Committee and some Somerset County Commissioners discovered a facsimile of the flag in the house of Joshua Miles, who permitted a reproduction to be created. [5] Later, in the 1990s, the flag inspired the design of the flag of the University of Maryland as the Eastern Shore campus was located in Somerset County. [7]
Somerset County is the southernmost county in the U.S. state of Maryland. As of the 2020 census, the population was 24,620, making it the second-least populous county in Maryland. The county seat is Princess Anne.
Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore was an English politician, peer and lawyer who was the first proprietor of Maryland. Born in Kent in 1605, he inherited the proprietorship after the death of his father, George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, for whom it had been intended. Calvert proceed to establish and manage the Province of Maryland as a proprietary colony for English Catholics from his English country house of Kiplin Hall in North Yorkshire.
The Red Ensign or "Red Duster" is the civil ensign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is one of the British ensigns, and it is used either plain or defaced with either a badge or a charge, mostly in the right half.
Baron Baltimore, of Baltimore, County Longford, was a title in the Peerage of Ireland. It was created in 1625 and ended in 1771, upon the death of its sixth-generation male heir, aged 40. Holders of the title were usually known as Lord Baltimore for short.
The Southern Colonies within British America consisted of the Province of Maryland, the Colony of Virginia, the Province of Carolina, and the Province of Georgia. In 1763, the newly created colonies of East Florida and West Florida would be added to the Southern Colonies by Great Britain until the Spanish Empire took back Florida. These colonies were the historical core of what would become the Southern United States, or "Dixie". They were located south of the Middle Colonies, albeit Virginia and Maryland were also considered as the Chesapeake Colonies.
The Province of Maryland was an English and later British colony in North America that existed from 1632 until 1776, when it joined the other twelve of the Thirteen Colonies in rebellion against Great Britain and became the U.S. state of Maryland. Its first settlement and capital was St. Mary's City, in the southern end of St. Mary's County, which is a peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay and is also bordered by four tidal rivers.
The flag of the state of Maryland is the 17th-century heraldic banner of arms of Cecil, 2nd Baron Baltimore. It consists of the arms of his father George, 1st Baron Baltimore (1579–1632), quartered with those of his grandmother, heiress of the Crossland family. The flag was officially adopted by the General Assembly of Maryland in 1904.
George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore was an English peer and politician. He achieved domestic political success as a member of parliament and later Secretary of State under King James I. He lost much of his political power after his support for a failed marriage alliance between Prince Charles and the Spanish House of Habsburg royal family. Rather than continue in politics, he resigned all of his political offices in 1625 except for his position on the Privy Council and declared his Catholicism publicly. He was created Baron Baltimore in the Peerage of Ireland upon his resignation. Baltimore Manor was located in County Longford, Ireland.
William Claiborne also, spelled Cleyburne was an English pioneer, surveyor, and an early settler in the colonies/provinces of Virginia and Maryland and around the Chesapeake Bay. Claiborne became a wealthy merchant and planter, as well as a major political figure in the mid-Atlantic colonies. He featured in disputes between the colonists of Virginia and the later settling of Maryland, partly because of his earlier trading post on Kent Island in the mid-way of the Chesapeake Bay, which provoked the first naval military battles in North American waters. Claiborne repeatedly attempted and failed to regain Kent Island from the Maryland Calverts, sometimes by force of arms, after its inclusion in the lands that were granted by a 1632 Royal Charter to the Calvert family. Kent Island had become Maryland territory after the surrounding lands were granted to Sir George Calvert, first Baron and Lord Baltimore (1579–1632) by the reigning King of England, Charles I.
The flag of Great Britain, commonly known as King's Colours, the first Union Flag, the Union Jack, or the British flag, was used at sea from 1606 and more generally from 1707 to 1801. It was the first flag of Great Britain. It is the precursor to the Union Jack of 1801.
Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, inherited the colony of Maryland in 1675 upon the death of his father, Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, (1605–1675). He had been his father's Deputy Governor since 1661 when he arrived in the colony at the age of 24. However, Charles left Maryland for England in 1684 and would never return. The events following the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 would cost Calvert his title to Maryland; in 1689 the royal charter to the colony was withdrawn, leading to direct rule by the British Crown. Calvert's political problems were largely caused by his Roman Catholic faith which was at odds with the established Church of England.
Benedict Leonard Calvert, 4th Baron Baltimore was an English peer and politician. He was the second son of Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore (1637–1715) by Jane Lowe, and became his father's heir upon the death of his elder brother Cecil in 1681. The 3rd Lord Baltimore was a devout Roman Catholic, and had lost his title to the Province of Maryland shortly after the events of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, when the Protestant monarchs William III and Mary II acceded to the British throne. Benedict Calvert made strenuous attempts to have his family's title to Maryland restored by renouncing Roman Catholicism and joining the Church of England.
Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, was a British nobleman and Proprietary Governor of the Province of Maryland. He inherited the title to Maryland aged just fifteen, on the death of his father and grandfather, when the colony was restored by the British monarchy to the Calvert family's control, following its seizure in 1688. In 1721 Charles came of age and assumed personal control of Maryland, travelling there briefly in 1732. For most of his life, he remained in England, where he pursued an active career in politics, rising to become Lord of the Admiralty from 1742 to 1744. He died in 1751 in England, aged 52.
The Eastern Shore of Maryland is a part of the U.S. state of Maryland that lies mostly on the east side of the Chesapeake Bay. Nine counties are normally included in the region. The Eastern Shore is part of the larger Delmarva Peninsula that Maryland shares with Delaware and Virginia.
Elihu Emory Jackson, a member of the United States Democratic Party, was the 41st Governor of Maryland in the United States from 1888 to 1892. He was born in 1837 in Delmar, Maryland and died in 1907 in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. He is buried at the Parsons Cemetery in Salisbury, Maryland, the county seat of Wicomico County. He was part owner of Pemberton Hall, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
Lieutenant-General Josias Fendall, Esq., was the 4th Proprietary Governor of Maryland. He was born in England, and came to the Province of Maryland. He was the progenitor of the Fendall family in America.
Thomas Greene of Bobbing, Kent, 2nd Proprietary Governor of Maryland was an early settler of the Maryland colony and second Provincial Governor of the colony from 1647 to 1648.
The flag of the East India Company was used to represent the East India Company, which was chartered in England in 1600. The flag was altered as the nation changed from England to Great Britain to the United Kingdom. It was initially a red and white striped ensign with the flag of England in the canton. The flag displayed in the canton was later replaced by the flag of Great Britain and then the flag of the United Kingdom, as the nation developed.
The Great Seal of Somerset County, Maryland, is the official county seal of Somerset County, Maryland, United States. The seal was created in 1666 but fell out of use in 1707 before being restored in 1957.
| Sovereign states | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dependent territories |
| ||||||||
| States, provinces and other administrative divisions |
| ||||||||
| Cities |
| ||||||||
| Miscellaneous |
| ||||||||
| Historical |
| ||||||||
