F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Rockville grave draws fans for his 130th birthday

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota, died in California and drew on his personal experience in New York and Paris to chronicle the Jazz Age.

But the celebrated American novelist, whose father’s family settled in Montgomery County, wrote to a friend in 1936 that he’d like to be buried with his wife in Baltimore, where he was living at the time: “I wouldn’t mind a bit if Zelda and I could snuggle up under a stone in some old graveyard here.”

Fitzgerald is buried in Maryland but not Baltimore. The author of “The Great Gatsby” lies in a grave under an old oak in Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church Cemetery in Rockville, on Veirs Mill Road, not far from the Red Line tracks.

Thursday will mark the 130th anniversary of Fitzgerald’s birth. Fans within and beyond the county are celebrating.

The F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival, a nonprofit founded in 1996 for what would have been his 100th birthday, will hold two Jazz Age teas in his honor at Strathmore on Tuesday and Wednesday. Both dates have sold out.

But there’s time to sign up for the annual Fitzgerald festival at Montgomery College on Oct. 24. It will feature lectures, writing workshops, film screenings, author talks and a tour of Fitzgerald’s Rockville haunts.

Most days, said Kathy Yates, pastoral assistant at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Fitzgerald’s grave site is quiet. But visitors tend to show up around his birthday, Sept. 24. They take pictures and leave flowers, pens, notes and sometimes bottles of liquor — a nod to the alcohol-fueled bashes Fitzgerald wrote about.

His wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, a novelist, painter and socialite, is also in the grave, and their daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, known as “Scottie,” is buried there too.

Fern Silva of Olney, who said she just reread “The Great Gatsby,” has long known Fitzgerald is buried in St. Mary’s, but she finally decided to stop by last week when she and her husband happened to be in the neighborhood.

“It’s not a piece of history that people are aware of,” she said.

“People still feel very connected to Fitzgerald,” said Jackson Bryer, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, which hosts conferences on the author’s work around the world.

“They really admire him for the sheer beauty of his writing. But I also think his own life story, his relationship with Zelda and the time in which he lived in the ’20s has a certain appeal beyond the writing.”

Fitzgerald in Montgomery County

The Fitzgeralds were Catholics who farmed on land north of Rockville near where the National Institute of Standards and Technology is today, said Eileen McGuckian, a local historian. The family worshiped at St. Mary’s. Fourteen of Fitzgerald’s relatives are buried there.

F. Scott Fitzgerald made visits to Rockville. McGuckian noted a trip in 1903, when Fitzgerald was 6, to a family home near Randolph Road for the wedding of his cousin, Cecilia Delihant. In 1931 he came for his father’s funeral at St. Mary’s, which has its fictional parallel in a scene from Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.”

In Fitzgerald’s day, about 2,000 people, many of them dairy farmers, lived in Rockville. In his introduction to the 1939 book “Colonial and Historic Homes of Maryland,” Fitzgerald called himself “one of the State’s adopted sons” and recalled his father’s stories about Union and Confederate cavalry riding through Montgomery County.

“[Fitzgerald’s] affection for his father’s roots in Maryland was very real,” Bryer said.

The burial — and reburial

When he died in Hollywood in 1940, at the age of 44 after a heart attack, Fitzgerald’s family sent his body to the Pumphrey Funeral Home in Bethesda. He was buried at Rockville Cemetery, near the Glenview Mansion, in the heart of Rockville.

It’s unclear why he wasn’t initially buried in the family plot in St. Mary’s. One theory, for which McGuckian said there is no evidence, is that the church considered him too lapsed a Catholic. Eight years later, Zelda Fitzgerald, who died in a psychiatric institution in North Carolina, was also buried in Rockville Cemetery.

In 1975, the Women’s Club of Rockville, working with the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, arranged for her parents to be reinterred in St. Mary’s.

“It seemed to everyone to be the right thing to do,” said McGuckian, who witnessed the reburial.

At the time, Frances Fitzgerald added a pearl gray stone to the grave site etched with the last line from “The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”