Annie Cooper Boyd House & Museum
The headquarters of the Sag Harbor Historical Museum, located at 174 Main Street, is locally known as the Annie Cooper Boyd House, as Annie was the most prominent of its residents. Although 1735 is painted on a beam inside the front door, the earliest record of the house is a 1796 mortgage which shows Joseph W and Sarah Halsey Foster living here. The Museum did its own investigation in 2022 by hiring a dendrochronologist to test the age of the wooden beams throughout the house. The conclusion: the oldest part of the house is the south half dating from 1760.
The house was originally built as a “half house,” meaning two windows to one side of the front door. There was a large chimney against the north wall. In 1793, an addition extended the house northward, which then placed the chimney in the center of the structure, making it a “full house.”
William H. Cooper acquired the house in 1871 from Henry Clay Foster and when Cooper died, he left it to his daughter Annie Burnham Cooper. Annie married William John Boyd in 1895, had two children (William and Nancy) during the next seven years, and in 1904, the Boyd’s transformed the house into a summer cottage and named it “Anchor to Windward.” They replaced the central chimney with two new fireplaces, one with a coal insert, and added stairs to the attic in the remaining space. Up until then, the attic was reachable only by ladder. The porch and dormer were also added around this time, becoming an outdoor “living room” during the warmer months.
The structural frame of the house is known as post-and-beam. The floors, windows, overhead beams and walls are original; some of the plaster was replaced when the Museum restored the house in the late 1990’s.
The south front room on the first floor was used as a parlor. The central west room, behind the chimney, was originally a kitchen and later used as a dining room. To raise money during the 1930s, Annie ran a tearoom where she served tea and cake, as well as clam chowder. She referred to the house as the “Herald House”, based on the name of Sag Harbor’s first newspaper, Frothingham’s Long Island Herald, which was later found to be a house across the street. The small room off the kitchen is sometimes called a birthing room and was used as a bedroom when the Boyd’s lived here. The bathroom was added in 1930; up until then, an outhouse was used in the backyard. The north room of the house, which was added in 1793, may have been a second parlor or more likely an additional bed chamber.
Annie was a prolific artist from childhood until her death in 1941, and it is worthy of note that some of her paintings hang on the walls but can also be seen on the wooden doors and plastered walls throughout the house.
Annie’s daughter Nancy Boyd Willey inherited the house from her mother. Willey had a new chimney built and the cellar excavated to accomodate a furnace in the 1960’s. When Nancy died in 1998, she left the house to the Sag Harbor Historical Society.
Sag Harbor Historical Museum
The Sag Harbor Historical Society was granted a provisional charter on April 18, 1986 which was then made Absolute on April 27, 1990. Nancy Boyd Willey bequeathed her house at 174 Main Street to the Society, and the organization took possession after her death in 1998. The house was replastered, and became the Society’s headquarters in the early 2000’s. On June 14, 2022, the Society’s charter was amended to change the corporate name to “Sag Harbor Historical Museum.”
The Museum operates under the guidance of a Board of Trustees, of which four serve as officers. The staff includes a director and an office manager. The Museum’s mission is to promote and encourage public education and appreciation with respect to the history of the Village of Sag Harbor, and to foster and otherwise work for the preservation of its historic buildings, sites and other materials. The Museum maintains it’s historic headquarters building which is in one of the oldest buildings in Sag Harbor, dating to 1760.