Annie Burton’s Restaurant

Annie L. Burton was an entrepreneur and restaurateur, who moved to Boston as a young woman after spending her childhood enslaved on an Alabama plantation. Annie spent decades as a domestic servant, first in the south, and then in the north, in Newton, the South End, Wellesley, Jamaica Plain, and other neighborhoods in and around Boston. For most Black women in the years and decades after emancipation, cooking, cleaning, raising children, and washing and ironing for white families were among the only opportunities available for paid work, making Annie’s experience utterly typical. Two things make her life unique: her decision to bet on herself and open a series of restaurants, first in Florida, then in Park Square in Boston, and then in a number of New England resort towns; and her decision, just after the turn of the 20th century, to put pen to page and write her story down and publish it, preserving the details of her life in a way that wasn’t available to most of her peers.

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