John Fanning Watson (June 13, 1779 - December 23, 1860) was a Philadelphia antiquarian, a chronicler and a historian who became a professional writer.

[1] As a young man he began gathering the reminiscences of elderly people, and collected them in the first major history of the city.

It includes such curiosities as squares of fabric cut from dresses worn by Philadelphia ladies at the "Mesquianza", an elaborate May 1778 pageant and ball hosted by British officers during the Revolutionary War occupation of the city.

That fight was lost, but the shock of the building's 1867 demolition — after Watson's death — helped spark a historic preservation movement in Philadelphia.

[citation needed] Still, it is because of him that we have the first-person accounts of people such as "Black Alice", an enslaved African woman reputedly born in Philadelphia 1686, who lived to age 116, and claimed to remember William Penn.