Marker to County's Namesake Dedicated in Town Center

He is the namesake of Montgomery County and of Rockville’s oldest public high school. But just who was Richard Montgomery?

After a three-year effort by student Stuart Grosvenor, a new historical marker in Rockville Town Center aims to answer that question.

On Friday, Grosvenor, joined by his father, , Montgomery County Councilwoman Nancy M. Floreen and members of the Maryland Historical Trust and the Daughters of the American Revolution, dedicated the marker on a patch of grass across East Jefferson Street from the new District Courthouse.

Grosvenor, a 16-year-old junior, was a student at Julius West Middle School when he began his effort. Working on an exhibit for National History Day, he discovered that while the there are more than 800 roadside markers across Maryland, there were none honoring Richard Montgomery.

Grosvenor wrote the text for the marker and filed an application with the Maryland Historical Trust. In April, the trust wrote Grosvenor to say the application had been approved and an aluminum marker would be erected.

In order to write the text for the marker, Grosvenor spent four or five months doing research and asking people at grocery stores and libraries if they knew who Montgomery was.

“About one in 10 people did,” he said.

Grosvenor said he was "surprised at how young [Montgomery] was. I also was surprised that he originally was in the British army.”

Montgomery was born in Raphoe, Ireland on Dec. 2, 1738. (The county declared Friday, the 273 anniversary of his birth as “Richard Montgomery Day.”) He was 18 years old when he was commissioned as an officer in the British army.

He fought in the French and Indian War and was considered the most experienced general in the Continental Army at the start of the Revolutionary War. Gen. George Washington put Montgomery in charge of the western army that marched into Canada to aid colonists who joined the revolution. Montgomery was killed while leading an attack on Quebec on Dec. 31, 1775, becoming the first general to die in the revolution.

A year later, the Maryland Constitutional Convention voted to split Frederick County into three parts, with the large eastern third named Montgomery. The smaller, mountainous third, in Western Maryland, was named Washington.

“As a history buff, I’m very grateful to the Maryland Historical Trust for this marker, and my hat is off to Stuart Grosvenor for his initiative on the project,” Floreen (D-At large) of Garrett Park said in a news release. “We sometimes forget that Montgomery County is named after a true American hero, so I’m glad we will now have this permanent reminder.”

Click here to read The Gazette’s report on Grosvenor’s efforts.