Rowland is best known for her biography of her great-great-granduncle, George Mason, a Founding Father of the United States.

[1][2] Rowland volunteered for the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.

[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.

[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.