[1][2] In fact, his great-grandfather Watson had been named a Colonel for Prince Edward County militiamen by then Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson, and fought in the American Revolutionary War.
[5] His maternal grandfather, a Nottoway County plantation owner, and possibly of higher social status than the Watsons, had been killed by a slave in 1847, the year of her birth (but her mother remarried, to George Daniel Horner who joined the 18th Virginia Infantry in 1864 as a private), and her 16-year-old brother died fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of Williamsburg in May 1862.
Watson attended an "old field" school, then Hampden-Sydney College (where one of his elder brother in laws taught) and graduated in 1887.
Early in Watson's life, Nottoway County had become an important railroad stop halfway between Petersburg and Danville, and his Congressional successor, Patrick H. Drewry, was a Petersburg-based lawyer and former state senator.
[7] This article incorporates public domain material from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress