Home of Annie Caldwell Boyd

55 14^th Street was the home of George E. and Annie Caldwell Boyd from around 1898 to the end of their lives in 1913 and 1918 respectively. Annie Caldwell Boyd was prominent in the West Virginia women’s suffrage movement, including serving as an officer in the West Virginia Equal Suffrage Movement and as secretary and president of the early Wheeling Political Equality Club. The house was demolished sometime between 1921 and 1951 and the Fort Henry Club building expanded.

Annie Caldwell was born October 29, 1842 into a prominent Wheeling family. Her father, Alfred Boyd, was mayor of Wheeling and a Virginia State Senator in the years prior to the Civil War. Annie Caldwell married George Edmund Boyd in 1863 and they had three children. George E. Boyd was a lawyer in Wheeling who served as a county and circuit court judge and had his own law practice which his son, George E. Boyd, Jr., also joined. Annie Caldwell Boyd and her daughter Beulah Boyd Ritchie were very active in the early West Virginia suffrage movement.

The women’s suffrage movement in West Virginia began in 1895 when efforts by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to kindle interest in the state led to the foundation of a statewide organization and nine local suffrage clubs. On November 14, 1895 the Wheeling Political Equality Club was founded by women meeting in the home of Dr. Harriet B. Jones. Annie Caldwell Boyd was elected as the recording secretary. Just a few weeks later, at the end of November, the West Virginia Equal Suffrage Association was founded at a convention at Grafton, WV and Annie Caldwell Boyd was elected as the first corresponding secretary. Boyd then served as president of the Wheeling Club October 1896 to October 1897. Also in 1986, Boyd—along with Jessie G. Manley, Fannie Wheat, Florence Post, and Florence M. Post—attended the NAWSA convention in Washington, D.C.

Annie Caldwell Boyd remained active in the suffrage movement well into her 70s. In 1913, Boyd along with Dr. Harriet B. Jones and Ellen Douglas Hoge marched in the suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. After their experiences at the capitol the three women spoke at a meeting in the Market Auditorium in Wheeling that revitalized the suffrage momentum in the city and led to the reformation of the old club as the Ohio County Equal Suffrage League. She even supported the tactics of the more radical National Woman’s Party, writing to them and donating money in the summer of 1917.

Annie Caldwell Boyd died February 9, 1918 and did not get to see the success of women’s suffrage. George E. and Annie Caldwell Boyd are interred at Greenwood Cemetery in Wheeling. 

“Annie B Caldwell Boyd.” Find A Grave. Accessed February 28, 2022. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/44091568/annie-b-boyd.

Effland, Anne Wallace. “The Woman Suffrage Movement in West Virginia, 1867-1920.” M. A. Thesis, West Virginia University, 1983.

“George Edmund Boyd.” Find A Grave. Accessed February 28, 2022. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/43963947/george-edmund-boyd.

Hoge, Florence. “Miss Florence Hoge Tells of the Forming of Suffrage Organizations in Ohio County: Their Contest for Recognition has been Most Spirited.” Wheeling Intelligencer, May 1, 1916. Fighting the Long Fight: West Virginia Women and the Right to Vote. A West Virginia Archives and History Online Exhibit. Accessed February 28, 2022. http://archive.wvculture.org/history/exhibitsonline/suffrage/suffragewheelinggroup.html.

Wheeling City Directories, 1872-1917. Accessed through Ancestry.com, February 28, 2022.

“Women in the West Virginia Woman Suffrage Movement.” Fighting the Long Fight: West Virginia Women and the Right to Vote. A West Virginia Archives and History Online Exhibit. Accessed February 28, 2022. http://129.71.204.160/history////exhibitsonline/suffrage/suffragewomen.html.