A ride on the Red Line might take you closer to Jazz Age royalty than you’d think. The final resting place of acclaimed author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda is located in Rockville, just a few blocks away from the Metro station.

Photo by ehpien on Flickr.

I learned about the gravesite from Atlas Obscura, a geography website. The Fitzgeralds’ graves are in the “Third Addition to Rockville and Old St. Mary’s Church and Cemetery” historic area, which includes several Victorian residential buildings, the 1817-built Old St. Mary’s Church, and the former Rockville B&O Railroad station. This historic center of Rockville reflects the time when the railroad station was the gateway to the city.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born into a prominent Maryland family: his father, Edward, was a distant cousin of Francis Scott Key, for whom Scott was named. But Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota and raised mostly in New York due to his father’s job. After graduating from Princeton and marrying Alabama socialite Zelda Sayre, he went on to write several of the most quintessential novels of the Jazz Age, including This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby.

Photo by Mr.TinDC on Flickr.

Unfortunately, although Fitzgerald was an iconic writer and one of the biggest celebrities of 1920s society, his success and health had greatly declined by the time of the Depression era. He died in Hollywood in December 1940, at the age of 44. Although he hadn’t left explicit instructions for where he would like to be interred, his estranged wife Zelda insisted that he be laid to rest in his family plot in Rockville.

As detailed in a 2014 Post article on the subject, St. Mary’s Church initially refused to bury Scott in the Fitzgerald family plot because he was not a practicing Catholic at the time of this death. He was thus interred about a mile east at Rockville Union Cemetery, where Zelda would join him when she was tragically killed in a hospital fire eight years later. It was not until 1975 that the Fitzgeralds’ daughter Scottie successfully petitioned for her parents to be moved to the family plot in St. Mary’s Cemetery.

Photo by sikeri on Flickr.

Zelda and Scott’s resting place is inscribed with the closing lines of his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

To learn about some other obscure and interesting locales in our region, check out the Atlas Obscura guide to Washington, DC.

Alex Cox is a transit analyst who currently lives and works in the Boston area. He is a longtime Greater Greater Washington reader, former intern at the Coalition for Smarter Growth, and a native of Arlington County. The views expressed here are his own.