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Fred Grafton Rounds was born January 6, 1893 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During the First World War, Rounds was commissioned a second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He was discharged as a first Lieutenant in April 1919.

Rounds began his career in architecture for the firm of Croft and Hoerner Architects, in Minneapolis. In 1923, Rounds joined the WSC Department of Architectural Engineering in 1923, where he served as an assistant professor of architecture and as an assistant designer in the college architect's office. He also joined with his colleague, Stanley A. Smith, in the architectural firm of Smith and Rounds. The partnership designed many residences in Pullman in the late 1920s, along with several sorority and fraternity houses. By the late 1920s, Rounds left his post at WSC to pursue a full-time private architecture practice in Tacoma and Chehalis. In 1932 he designed the center unit addition to the Pullman High School. In 1934 he returned to the WSC campus to oversee several college building construction project sponsored by the federal Public Works Administration. From 1937 to 1950, Rounds he served as superintendent of the State College's Department of Buildings and Grounds. He retired from WSC in 1958.

In 1919, Rounds married Ruth Wikoff. The union brought three children, Jeanne (later Mrs. Harold Olsen), Margery (later Mrs. Earl Muir), and Fred G. Rounds, Jr. Ruth Rounds died in 1949. Fred Rounds was remarried in 1955, to Dora Schumacher Sanger. He died on May 2, 1972.