Watts, Levi P.

Born: 1826-XX-XX Indiana

Flourished: 1846 to 1849 Sangamon County, Illinois

Levi P. Watts, farmer and broom maker, seems to have lived in the area of Springfield, Illinois, from at least 1846 through about 1849. Watts enlisted in June of 1846 as a private under Colonel Edward D. Baker in the Fourth Regiment of Illinois Volunteers and served in the Mexican War in April and May of the following year. In 1848 Watts voted in Sangamon County as a Democrat. He married Lovina H. Kinney in 1849 in Vermilion County and settled in the county thereafter. Watts and his wife had several children. At the time of the 1860 census he was working as a broom maker and owned personal property valued around $150 to $200 dollars. Watts registered for the draft in Vermilion County in 1863, but there is no evidence that he served.

Isaac H. Elliott, Record of the Services of Illinois Soldiers in the Black Hawk War, 1831-32, and in the Mexican War, 1846-8 (Springfield, IL: H. W. Rokker, 1882), 285-87; "Lincoln, The Mexican War, and Springfield's Veterans," Lincoln Lore 1701 (1979), 1; Illinois State Register (Springfield), 14 August 1846, 3:6; 3 September 1847, 3:6; Illinois Daily Journal (Springfield), 2 May 1849, 3:2; Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, Vermilion County, 19 December 1849, Illinois State Archives, Springfield, IL; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Vermilion County, IL, 291; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Vermilion County, IL, 122-23, 376; U.S., Civil War Draft Registrations Records, 1863-1865 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2010).