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]
American Civil War
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]
Civic and organizational involvement
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]
