Rosalie Santine Gould (1925–)

Rosalie Santine Gould was a longtime mayor of McGehee (Desha County) best known for her efforts to preserve the cemetery and monuments from the Rohwer Relocation Center, one of two Japanese American internment camps that were located in Arkansas during World War II.

Rosalie Santine was born on July 17, 1925, in Tillar (Drew and Desha counties), the second of four daughters of Catholic Italian immigrants Serafine D. Santine and Cecilia Floriani Santine. She attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1944–1945 but did not complete her studies.

Returning to southeastern Arkansas, she married Joe C. Gould Jr. on June 8, 1949. The young couple lived at Rohwer (Desha County), across the road from the site of the former Rohwer Relocation Center. They had four children: Clayton, Cecilia, Mitchell, and Vivienne (Lie). Joe Gould Jr. died on February 17, 1965, at the age of forty and is buried in McGehee Cemetery.

Rosalie Gould continued to run their farm after her husband died. In November 1977, she became the first woman appointed to the McGehee City Council. She moved from Rohwer to McGehee in 1981. In 1983, she was elected mayor of McGehee, serving for twelve years. Her tenure as mayor was occupied with making improvements to McGehee. In 1989, she worked to prevent the importation of East Coast garbage to southeastern Arkansas, leading a petition drive to gather hundreds of signatures against the proposal. In 1990, she oversaw infrastructure projects for the municipal airport. She demanded a U.S. census recount in 1991, and in 1994, she assisted residents who lost their homes in severe flooding.

When elected mayor in 1983, she cut the McGehee mayor’s salary from $1,500 per month to $600 per month. But instead of depositing the salary into her own account, “she gave it to the city department that needed it the most” at the time.

In 1986, she was appointed to the thirty-nine-member Committee for Arkansas’s Future by Governor Bill Clinton. In 1989, she was named to the Department of Business Administration Advisory Council at the University of Arkansas at Monticello (UAM).

As former inmates of the Rohwer and Jerome Relocation Centers began to visit southeastern Arkansas looking for remnants of the camps, they found Gould. In 1982, when she was president of the McGehee Women’s Chamber of Commerce, she was asked to give a dinner for former Rohwer inmates who were returning to Arkansas to dedicate a new monument at the site of the former camp. She knew nothing about the camps, having been in Fayetteville during much of the war, but she welcomed the former inmates with her special blend of Southern/Italian American hospitality. She began to work with Sam Yada of Sherwood (Pulaski County) and George T. Sakaguchi of St. Louis, Missouri, both former inmates at Rohwer, to preserve what was left at the Rohwer site—twenty-eight graves and two concrete monuments erected by inmates while the camp was still in operation.

Gould’s work to welcome returning former inmates and preserve the cemetery and monuments led to a friendship with Mabel Rose Jamison Vogel, a former art teacher at Rohwer. When Vogel died in 1994, she entrusted her collection of inmate art to Gould. In 2011, Gould donated the collection to the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System. The Rosalie Santine Gould–Mabel Rose Jamison Vogel Collection is considered the largest art collection from a single Japanese American relocation center.

Gould envisioned restoring the train depot in McGehee and transforming it into a museum about the camps as well as a place to showcase the inmate art saved by Vogel. She abandoned the effort after she encountered strong opposition (even some death threats) from citizens of McGehee, who were resistant to the idea of highlighting part of American history that they viewed as negative. The community eventually came around to the idea and did construct a museum, although without Gould being involved. The World War II Japanese Internment Museum opened in McGehee in the southern building of the city’s Missouri Pacific Depot in 2013.

In 1992, the Rohwer Relocation Center Memorial Cemetery was made a National Historic Landmark, largely due to the efforts of Gould to preserve the two monuments that stand within the cemetery.

For additional information:
Dishongh, Kimberly. “Former McGehee Mayor, 98, Chronicled Internment Camps.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, June 7, 2024, pp. 1D, 6D. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/jul/07/former-mcgehee-mayor-98-chronicled-internment (accessed February 12, 2025).

Grubb, Abbie Salyers. “Rosalie Gould.” Densho Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Rosalie_Gould/ (accessed February 12, 2025).

Harmelen, Jonathan Van. “Memories of Arkansas: A Thank You to Rosalie Santine Gould.” The Rafu Shimpo, February 19, 2024. https://rafu.com/2024/02/memories-of-arkansas-a-thank-you-to-rosalie-santine-gould/ (accessed February 12, 2025).

O’Brien, Keith. “Remembering the Relocation.” Oxford American 84 (Spring 2014). https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-84-spring-2014/remembering-the-relocation (accessed February 20, 2025).

Rosalie Santine Gould–Mabel Rose Jamison Vogel Collection. Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. Central Arkansas Library System, Little Rock, Arkansas. Finding aid online at https://arstudies.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/findingaids/id/9602/ (accessed February 12, 2025).

Welky, Ali, ed. A Captive Audience: Voices of Japanese American Youth in World War II Arkansas. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2015.

Heather Zbinden
Central Arkansas Library System