By Diana Hottell
Even though I’ve lived the last 43 years in Twisp, Washington (Population 900), my family roots are deep under the paved streets of New York City.
The Fraunces Tavern, for instance, was built as a wedding gift for direct ancestors of mine. Plus, 130 acres spanning 21st to 30th Streets were the estate of my great-great, etc. grandparents.
My maiden name is Watts, and Wattses began coming ashore here in 1698. If you go down to Trinity Church, there’s a statue of John Watts lording it over all the other graves including Alexander Hamilton’s. He’s an uncle of mine.
Since most of my male ancestors seem to have had a compulsion to marry class and wealth, Delanceys and Van Cortlandts, and Van Rensselaers start spangling the family tree.
Cousins of mine deeply interested in our lineage, who live closer than Twisp to this city, have recently passed on what they’ve gleaned from delving into archives at the New York Historical Society.
They discovered that Robert Watt, a 20-year-old Scot, came to New York just before 1700. When he stepped onto the muddy streets he added an “s” to his name and settled on Wall Street. He became a successful merchant and his first venture was a five-month trip into “5 Nation” Indian country to trade furs.
With his marriage to Mary Nicholl in 1705, he became a valued member of the innermost court circle. Their son John Watts was born here in 1715. When Robert died, most of his estate passed directly to John, including properties in Jamaica, Queens, and about 4000 acres of wilderness in the Mohawk Valley.
In 1742, John married Ann Delancey, daughter of Ann (Van Cortlandt) Delancey. The Fraunces Tavern, down at 54 Pearl Street, now towered over by surrounding skyscrapers, had been built as a wedding present for her parents, Ann Van Cortlandt and Stephen Delancey in 1719.
Their townhouse was a three-story mansion on the north side of Dock Street, now Pearl Street, between Whitehall and Broad with stables in the rear on Bridge Street. His large warehouse stood on Hanover Square.
I suppose I should admit here that John Watts obtained at least some of his wealth as a slave trader. He owned a large estate of orchards and farm fields running from 21st to 30th Streets, from Broadway to the East River. There, he built another grand house and called it Rose Hill.
The other day, as I was wandering around looking for the site of the old manor house, I figured it was about where a parking garage, shoe repair shop, and comedy club now stand. And then I spied the Rose Hill Tavern, on the corner of 25th Street and 3rd Avenue. It made me happy that there was some sort of tribute to that bygone time.
Names from the family tree kept popping up as I wandered the city. There’s Van Cortlandt Park, Cortlandt Street, near Delancey Street. Then there’s Carroll Gardens named, I found out, after my maternal ancestor Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence.
If you follow Delancey Street with your finger across a map of lower Manhattan, do a little cha cha cha at its western end, you run into Watts Street, close by the entry to the Holland Tunnel.
Urged by my cousins, I climbed to the second floor library of the New York Historical Society and asked for anything pertaining to John Watts. After being deemed upstanding enough, I sat and waited in the silent hall until a cart was rolled in with four boxes of primary documents. It was almost a shock to my system to hold 300-year-old pages, crowded with the slanted handwriting of my long-ago ancestors. One sheet had once been folded to form its own envelope, sealed with wax, and addressed to, simply: “John Watts New York.”
When I think back to my ancestors walking the pliant earth of this new world settlement I try to feel what they felt. But imagine how difficult it would have been for them to imagine what I’d be like, over 300 years into the future, someone who could fly through the air at 35,000 feet and cross this continent in mere hours, a continent whose size and richness they could not have possibly conceived.
