Annie Cooper Boyd

Annie Cooper Boyd (1864–1941) was an American feminist, artist and diarist.

Born Annie Burnham Cooper in Sag Harbor, New York, the daughter of William Huntting Cooper, a prosperous boatbuilder, and Nancy Burnham Beckwith Cooper, Annie was the youngest of eleven children.

Growing up in Sag Harbor, her brothers taught her to sail, swim, ride horseback, skate, and climb trees; she excelled at all of them, proving she was “as good as a boy.” At the age of 16, she began keeping a diary, which she continued writing well into adulthood.

Annie loved to paint and draw from an early age, later studying painting in the summer at William Merritt Chase’s school in Shinnecock and during the winter with private teachers in Brooklyn. Annie’s love of the outdoors and her talent for drawing and painting merged naturally. She spent much of her free time capturing the images of local churches, buildings, landscapes, ponds and places that had special meaning to her. The Museum has over 600 pieces of Annie’s original art, which preserves for future generations views of old Sag Harbor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of her paintings and sketches are of places and houses that no longer exist. Annie would paint and draw on any medium she could obtain, including cardstock, cardboard, and even the plaster walls and wooden doors within the cottage. There are mermaids on the wall behind the bathroom tub and Montauk Lighthouse appears on the pantry door. The museum has published excerpts from her diaries and images of her paintings, as Anchor to Windward: the Diaries and Paintings of Annie Cooper Boyd: Written (1880–1935) and Annie Burnham Cooper Her Diary 1881-1894.

Annie’s father died in 1894, and a year later she married William John Boyd, with whom she moved to Brooklyn. They kept the cottage in Sag Harbor which her father had willed to her and used it as a summer home. Their son William Cooper Boyd was born in 1898, and their daughter Nancy Cooper Boyd followed four and a half years later. The Boyd family spent summers in Sag Harbor in the home Annie called her “Anchor to Windward.”

Once the children had grown and John retired, Annie and her husband lived full-time in the cottage in Sag Harbor. By 1930, the country was well into the depression and Annie earned extra money for household expenses by opening a tea room in the house, offering sandwiches, clam chowder, beverages, and fancy desserts.

Annie died in 1941, leaving her daughter, Nancy Boyd Willey, the cottage in Sag Harbor and her great love of the little village and an appreciation of its beautiful settings and architecture. Nancy made the preservation of Sag Harbor’s historic sites and conservation of its natural resources and beauty a primary objective in her life.