Who Are the Wives?
Katharine L. Brown, Ph.D
Katharine Lowe Brown, a native of Parkersburg, West Virginia, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia, with a history major. She took her Ph.D. in history from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore under a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship.
She has taught American history, colonial and revolutionary America, and women's history at Bucknell University, St. Louis Community College, Radford University, and Hollins. Since 1982 she has taught historic preservation, museum studies, and furniture history courses at Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, Virginia, where she is an adjunct Professor of History and Art.
Katharine began a twenty-year career in museum administration as associate director and then director of the Stonewall Jackson House in Lexington, Virginia. She was Executive Director of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation, Staunton, Virginia, from 1981-1991. There she initiated an education program, the reinterpretation of the historic house, and the development of a new Wilson exhibit and museum in a restored and adapted mansion. From 1991-1992 she held a museum fellowship from the British Council with the Ulster-American Folk Park in Belfast and Omagh, Northern Ireland. From 1993-1998, Katharine headed the Research and Collections Department at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia. There she and her staff developed detailed furnishings plans for a seventeenth-century English yeoman's house and an eighteenth century Ulster Scots farm from County Tyrone, Ireland, and laid the groundwork for African-American interpretation at the museum's Valley of Virginia farm.
Since 1979, Katharine has been the volunteer Historiographer of the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia. She has served on the boards of the Episcopal Women's History Project, the Augusta County Historical Society and the Virginia Association of Museums. She is currently involved in the planning and fund-raising for the R.R. Smith History and Art Center, a $3 million restoration and adaptive use project in Staunton. She is an officer of the Memorial Foundation of the Germanna Colonies in Virginia (Germanna Foundation), a 2,000-member organization of descendants of the first German settlers in Virginia in 1714 and 1717.
Travel is Katharine's leisure passion. She puts that experience to good use organizing and leading group tours to Ireland, Austria, and Germany as fund-raisers for her Rotary Club, the historical society, her parish, and the Germanna Foundation.
She and her husband Madison, an avid hiker and environmental activist, are the parents of three sons, Joel, Adam, and Chancellor, and grandparents of Isabel, Eleanor, and Nancy.
Nancy Sorrells
Dorothy A. Boyd-Bragg
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