| Updated: May 15, 2021, 12:37 a.m.
Green Flake, an enslaved worker and Latter-day Saint from North Carolina, arrived in the Salt Lake Valley with two other Black pioneers July 22, 1847 two days before Mormon prophet Brigham Young supposedly declared, “This is the place.”
Flake, Hark Lay and Oscar Crosby Smith scouted the valley, tilled the ground, planted crops, and laid down a trail for their enslavers and vanguard wagons that soon would arrive.
The three are memorialized at This Is the Place Heritage Park, near the mouth of Emigration Canyon in the eastern foothills, as well as downtown, on the Main Street Plaza’s larger-than-life Brigham Young statue, where they are listed as “colored servants.”