Anne Sullivan Haynie

Anne Sullivan Haynie, a longtime civic volunteer and newsletter editor from Sumter, South Carolina, who was also the mother of Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie, died on September 26, 2026, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, at the age of 90.

Born in Anderson, South Carolina, in 1936, she was a graduate of Anderson Girls High School (later T.L. Hanna High School) and earned a journalism degree from the University of Georgia, where she was active in campus life, including membership in Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, the Panhellenic Council, the Women's Student Government Association and Mortar Board, and was named to Who's Who Among American Colleges and Universities. She later married Dr. William Ransom Haynie II, a radiologist who practiced in Sumter and who died in August 2025, and the couple settled in Sumter, where she spent most of her adult life.

Haynie put her journalism training to use as a community volunteer editor rather than in a commercial newsroom. She served as editor of the first newsletter for the Friends of Swan Lake Gardens, a well known public garden and bird sanctuary in Sumter, and was a former editor of the South Carolina Medical Alliance newsletter. Over the decades she took on leadership and board roles across a wide range of Sumter institutions, including Women of the Church at First Presbyterian Church of Sumter, the YMCA board, Friends of the Library, the Sumter Historical Society, the Sumter Gallery of Art, the Sumter Art Association, the social group Les Trente Club, and a private book club, a record of sustained volunteerism that reflected a life built around civic institutions and the arts in her adopted hometown.

Her public profile widened in her later years through her son, James William Haynie, who is known as Will Haynie and who serves as mayor of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. She had moved from Sumter to Mount Pleasant, and it was there that she died. She is also survived by her daughter, Nancy Haynie Cheatham of Monteagle, Tennessee, five grandchildren and three great grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband, her parents John Guy Sullivan and Lucy Sherard Sullivan, and her brothers John William Sullivan and David Sherard Sullivan.

No cause of death has been made public. A visitation was scheduled for September 30, 2026, at the J. Henry Stuhr Mount Pleasant Chapel, with a funeral service to be arranged separately in Sumter through Elmore Hill McCreight Funeral Home. The family has asked that memorial gifts be directed to First Presbyterian Church in Sumter. Tributes so far have focused on her decades of quiet civic service and on her role as matriarch of a family well known in both Sumter and Mount Pleasant.