Rowland Cotton was a soldier of the Revolutionary War, serving in the Connecticut militia from December 1775 until June 1783. He enlisted from Pomfret, Conn., as a private in Knowlton's Rangers under Colonel John Durkee, was promoted to corporal and then to 1st sergeant, and also served in the Alexander Hamilton Light Infantry under Colonel Zebulon Smith Butler. He engaged in the battles of Harlem Heights, Trenton, Princeton, Germantown, Fort Mifflin (Mud Island), Monmouth, and the siege and surrender of Yorktown.

". . . received a commission as captain in the militia of Montgomery County [New York] from Governor George Clinton in 1793, and . . . moved to Buffalo in 1806. He settled on Buffalo Plains, where his farm adjoined that of Colonel William Chapin. It was along the line of their boundary fence that he and Colonel Chapin buried the bodies of the soldiers of the War of 1812, in the grave since suitably marked."
--From a Buffalo newspaper article.

He served in the War of 1812, from Dec. 16, 1813 to Jan. 26, 1814 as Captain and Acting Brigade Quartermaster under Brig. General Timothy S. Hopkins of the New York Militia, and sustained a wound to his knee in a retreat from Black Rock, December 30, 1813.