WATT, CHARLES CLOUSTON (1832-1893)

WATT, CHARLES CLOUSTON, shipbuilder and general merchant; bap. Stromness, Orkney, Scotland, 12 Nov 1832, s/o Alexander Watt, collector of customs, and Jane Malcolm; m. 1854, Margaret Muirhead, sister, or half-sister, of William Muirhead; d. Summerside, P.E.I., 16 Feb 1893.

Charles C. Watt arrived in New Brunswick as a youth and found employment in Dalhousie with the lumber firm of Arthur Ritchie & Co. He left there to work in Guelph, Upper Canada, but soon returned and hired on as a clerk with the William Muirhead firm in Chatham. He was later a partner of Robert Johnston in a flour and provision business in the town. Watt & Johnston built the barques Chatham and Jane Malcolm, before the partnership was dissolved in 1865. Watt then had a provision business on his own for several years.

Watt next moved to Newcastle and in 1876 became the leasee of the South West Boom. A year later he opened a new store and returned to shipbuilding. In 1878 he had the barque Premier Mckenzie constructed for him at the former Harding yard in Newcastle. In the same year, he withdrew from the five-year contract he had signed with the South West Boom Co. In 1880 he launched the barque Richard Hutchison, the figurehead of which was "a fine life-like bust of the man she was named for." Designed by James Henderson, and constructed under the supervision of William Yorston, this was the last square-rigged vessel to be built on the Miramichi. The ship was still owned by Watt in 1881 when she arrived in New York from Bilbao, Spain, with a cargo of pig iron, but her ownership was transferred soon afterwards to Troop & Son of Saint John.

In 1881 Watt sold his wharf and store property to Charles S. Ramsay. He was later in the auctioneering business but was soon in serious financial trouble, and around 1884 he and his family relocated in Montreal. On a trip to the Miramichi in 1886 he was arrested for debt and brought before the court. He did not deny owing the money but stated that he owned nothing and had only a commercial traveller's income, which was barely adequate for his needs. This would seem to have convinced the court that there was nothing to be gained by detaining him. He was visiting in Prince Edward Island when he died in 1893, at age sixty. He and his wife, Margaret Muirhead, had four sons and a daughter who lived to maturity.