Last updated: March 10, 2023
Person
Green Flake
Image/Public Domain
Quick Facts
Significance:
Enslaved from birth and brought on the Mormon Pioneer Trail
Place of Birth:
Lilesville, Anson County, North Carolina
Date of Birth:
6 January 1828
Place of Death:
Gray’s Lake, Idaho
Date of Death:
October 20, 1903
Place of Burial:
Union Cemetery
Cemetery Name:
Salt Lake City, Utah
Green Flake was born into slavery on 6 January 1828 in Lilesville, Anson County, North Carolina. His master, Jordan Flake, gave ten-year-old Green to his son James Madison Flake as a wedding gift in 1838. James and his wife, Agnes, moved shortly thereafter to Mississippi with their three-year-old son, taking along Green and their other slaves. They intended to help colonize land that had been opened to white settlers following the government’s forced removal of several American Indian communities to present-day Oklahoma. While in Mississippi, the Flake family joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not long afterward, Brigham Young assumed leadership of the church and began organizing a mass migration of the Latter-day Saints to the American West.
The Flake household would eventually follow in Young’s footsteps, but first they traveled to Illinois in 1844, where the church accepted Green’s labor as part of the Flake family tithing. When Young led the first LDS wagon companies out of Nauvoo in 1846, three Mormon families from Mississippi volunteered their enslaved men—Green Flake, Oscar Crosby, and Hark Lay—to go along as laborers. Brigham Young insisted that these men join his vanguard party to chart the path into the Salt Lake Valley and to prepare homes for the oncoming families. These African American men made vital contributions during the pioneer trek, with Green acting as Brigham Young’s personal wagon driver.
Green made particularly significant contributions during the trek’s final days. When Brigham Young lay ill at the head of Emigration Canyon, just east of the Salt Lake Valley, Green was one of a select few chosen to prepare the road into the valley. By the time Young arrived in the valley a few days later, Green had already planted crops. When James and Agnes Flake arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in October 1848, they found that Green had built them a comfortable log cabin in the Holladay area, about ten miles from Salt Lake City.
James Madison Flake died in 1850, not long after Young had ordered Mississippi Saints like the Flakes to establish a new colony in San Bernardino, California. Agnes Flake died there from a long-term illness in 1854. For reasons unknown, Green did not make the move to California. Before her death, Agnes asked Brigham Young to sell Green to raise funds for her family; no sale took place, however, and Green may have considered himself free. It is possible that Green was given to Brigham Young, who then freed him.
By this time, Green Flake had married Martha Crosby, who had been baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while enslaved in Mississippi. Green and Martha had two children, Lucinda and Abraham, and they remained in Union (a few miles southwest of Holladay) until the late 1890s. They farmed there and pursued mining ventures. The 1860 census listed Green’s occupation listed as a “common laborer”; most of his neighbors were either listed as laborers or farmers. In June 1862, Flake and his family were emancipated when Congress eliminated slavery in all U.S. territories.
Under the leadership of Brigham Young, the church began to exclude Black men from the priesthood and restrict Black Mormons’ access to the temple. Green, however, remained devoted to the church. Late in his life, he often gave speeches at local celebrations. In 1896, Green moved to Gray’s Lake, Idaho, to be near his children and grandchildren, but he returned frequently to Salt Lake City to join in the Jubilee Pioneer Day celebrations. An 1894 newspaper account described the surviving pioneers and proclaimed Green “one of the most interesting of these old-timers,” noting his status as “the only colored survivor of the band of ’47.”
Green Flake died in Gray’s Lake, Idaho, on October 20, 1903 and was buried next to Martha at Union Cemetery in Salt Lake City. Green’s service as a Mormon pioneer is memorialized, along with Oscar Crosby and Hark Lay, on the Brigham Young statue in downtown Salt Lake City; it celebrates the vanguard company—and its three African American members—who paved the way for the Latter-Day Saints into the Salt Lake Valley.
(Special thanks to UNM PhD candidate Angela Reiniche for compiling this information)