“I just got caught in the pluff mud,” said Rowland, distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. Since his parents moved him and his brother to Beaufort in 1952, Rowland has left Beaufort only to attend school or serve a 4 1/2-year hitch in the Navy after earning his bachelor’s degree from Hamilton College in upstate New York. “And all I did during that time was read history books and try to figure out how to get back to Beaufort.”

Rowland went to graduate school on the GI Bill, then surprised — and perhaps even upset — his professors when he took a job teaching history at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. “They wanted me to go off to a major university, but this was all I wanted to do,” Rowland said. He found a patron in John Duffy, who was trained as a historian and in 1959 helped convert Beaufort College into a USC branch campus. Duffy hired Rowland to be a professor and administrator at USCB in 1971, and they became fast friends.

Through the years, Rowland had opportunities to teach elsewhere. And he admits he was sometimes tempted to find a more lucrative line of work, the better to support a wife and three children. But leaving Beaufort was never a consideration. Not even when Duffy, who oversaw USC’s entire branch system, tried to lure him to another campus. Rowland told him flatly: He’d rather be unemployed in Beaufort than the mayor of the town Duffy was trying to recruit him to.

Arguably, Rowland’s deep affection for both history and Beaufort was inherited. Rowland’s mother, Elizabeth Sanders Rowland, traced her family’s Beaufort roots to the 1600s. She kept her young son well-stocked in historical biographies and read to him from “A Diary From Dixie” — the Civil War journal of Mary Boykin Chesnut, a Charleston socialite and wife of a Confederate general. “She loved Southern history, and she loved Beaufort history, even though she was raised and educated in the north,” Rowland said.

After Elizabeth Rowland’s mother died in 1910, when she was just 8, her father sent her to live with her grandmother in Beaufort every summer until enrolling at Smith College in Massachusetts. “She just never got over this place, and having written this book in part about that era, I now can see what got in my mother’s head and why she loved it so much,” Rowland said. Indeed, the task of writing the most recent installment of Beaufort’s historical trilogy was particularly intimate to Rowland. It covers the years 1893 to 2006 and frequently covers events he witnessed or people he knew.

For instance, his mother was a close friend of one of Beaufort’s great patrons, Kate Gleason, a wealthy engineer, businesswoman and philanthropist originally from Rochester, N.Y. Elizabeth Rowland and Gleason met on a voyage to Europe in 1924. Gleason hired her to be her secretary and traveling companion, and in 1926 Rowland convinced Gleason to visit the town she so adored. Gleason stayed, and she began buying, developing and donating land. She gave the community the property where Beaufort Memorial Hospital was constructed, built the renowned Gold Eagle Hotel and developed Colony Gardens on Lady’s Island.

Gleason purchased Dataw Island, intending to develop it, as well. However, she died in 1933 before she could see her vision through. In her will, she left the property to Elizabeth, and it remained in the Rowland family for five decades. It served as a family retreat. It was used to raise hogs and cattle, leased to tomato farmers and cut for timber. With six children in college between them and tuition bills to pay, Rowland and his brother decided to sell the property in 1980. Alcoa Properties purchased the land and created an award-winning development there.

Such intersections between Rowland’s life and his life’s work led him and Wise to include a disclaimer in their footnotes, which begins this way: “Both authors of this volume have lived in Beaufort County during most of the last half-century. We make no claim of historical objectivity for this concluding chapter.” Though writing the three-volume history consumed about 30 years of his life, Rowland said its completion did not leave him wistful. ‘You just want to create the object,” Rowland said. “Besides, I haven’t lacked for stuff to do (since the book’s publication).”

Rowland is working on other book projects, among them an edited collection of essays about South Carolina during Reconstruction. Though he stopped teaching at USCB in 2000, he still does other work for the school and lectures there occasionally. Already, there is more interesting Beaufort history to write. His work with Wise ended just before the housing bubble brought an end to a period of phenomenal growth. “I ended on a high note, in a moment in history,” Rowland says with a smile.

The crash will be an interesting place to resume the telling of Beaufort’s history, but that is work that will be left to others. That footnote about objectivity that Rowland and Wise included in their final volume? It ends this way: “We hope that it provides useful encouragement to the next generation of historians who might undertake to write volume 4 of The History of Beaufort County.”