| Kate Mason Rowland | |
| Birth Date: | 22 June 1840 |
| Birth Place: | Detroit, Michigan |
| Death Place: | Richmond, Virginia |
| Occupation: | author, genealogist, historian, biographer, editor, historic preservationist |
| Relations: | great-great-grandniece of George Mason |
Kate Mason Rowland (June 22, 1840 – June 28, 1916)[1] [2] was an American author, historian, genealogist, biographer, editor and historic preservationist. Rowland is best known for her biography of her great-great-granduncle, George Mason, a Founding Father of the United States. Rowland was also a charter member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.[3] She later went by the name of "Kate Mason."[1]
Kate Mason Rowland and her twin sister, Elizabeth Moir Mason Rowland, were born on June 22, 1840, to Major Isaac S. Rowland and his wife, Catherine Armistead Mason.[1] [2] Rowland was a granddaughter of John Thomson Mason and a niece of Stevens Thomson Mason.[1] [2]
Rowland volunteered for the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.[4] She served as a nurse at Camp Winder Hospital in Richmond, Virginia.[4] On April 4, 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.[5] 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.[5] Both of Rowland's brothers, Thomas Rowland (1842 - 1874) and John Thomson Mason (1844 - 1901), served in the Confederate States Army.[4]
Rowland was a charter member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.[3] [6] Rowland found the moniker "War of the Rebellion" for the American Civil War unacceptable.[7] 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.'"[7] Rowland's resolution went further, instructing members to induce the Federal government to use the preferred term.[7]
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.[6] She was an honorary member of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore.[6]
In 2010 the Library of Virginia posthumously honored Rowland as one of their "Virginia Women in History" for her contributions to writing.[8]