Background
Rowland was a granddaughter of John Thomson Mason and a niece of Stevens Thomson Mason.
Rowland was a granddaughter of John Thomson Mason and a niece of Stevens Thomson Mason.
Rowland is best known for authoring what is widely considered the definitive biography of her great-great-granduncle, George Mason, a Founding Father of the United States. She later went by the name of "Kate Mason." Rowland volunteered for the Confederate States Army during the She served as a nurse at Camp Winder Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. On 4 April 1865, after the Confederate government abandoned Richmond, Rowland, then a matron at the Marine Hospital (also known as the Naval Hospital), sang “patriotic songs” to hospitalized soldiers.
She described the scene in her diary as "overflowing with merriment," in which a casual observer would “hardly realize we were all prisoners” of the Union.
Both of Rowland"s brothers, Thomas Rowland (1842–1874) and John Thomson Mason (1844–1901), served in the Confederate States Army. Rowland found the moniker "War of the Rebellion" for the unacceptable.
She introduced a resolution at a United Daughters of the Confederacy meeting in November 1899 requiring members to "use every influence, as a body and individually, to expel from the literature of the country and from the daily press, the phrase, "war of the rebellion," and to have substituted for it the phrase, "War Between the States."" Rowland"s resolution went further, instructing members to induce the Federal government to use the preferred term.
Rowland was also a charter member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Rowland was a charter member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In addition to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Rowland was also an active member of the Virginia Historical Society, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society.
She was an honorary member of the Woman"s Literary Club of Baltimore.