Otis Tufton Mason

In 1850, the Masons purchased Woodlawn Plantation, the former home of George Washington's adopted daughter Nellie Custis and her descendants.

Otis Mason gave a portion of the property in 1872 to establish the Woodlawn Baptist Church, and preached there for the first four years, until a minister was appointed.

Mason worked closely with George Brown Goode in the installation and reorganization of the museum collections that came with the move into that new building.

[2] In 1890 Mason was appointed by President Benjamin Harrison to the newly created Board on Geographic Names in Executive Order No.

In 1893 he with Frederic Ward Putnam, head of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, and Sol Bloom oversaw the cultural and anthropological display of the Midway Plaisance at the World's Columbian Exposition.