On the AuntJemima.com website, the company’s official history says Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood of the Pearl Milling Co. developed Aunt Jemima, the first ready mix, in 1889 and sold the Aunt Jemima Manufacturing Co. to R.T. Davis the next year.
Oral history places Green’s birth in the 1830s on a farm on Somerset Creek, six miles outside Mount Sterling in Eastern Kentucky, said Miles Hoskins, president of the Montgomery County Historical Society.
“There are no birth certificates from slave days for black people. They were property,” Hoskins said, adding local farmers from that area named Green were known to raise tobacco, hay, cattle and hogs.
During the Civil War, Mount Sterling changed hands a dozen times, with Confederates repeatedly flushing Union soldiers from the courthouse square. By war’s end, Green dwelled in a wood frame shack, which still stands, behind a grand home on Main Street, where she worked as house servant, Hoskins said.
“As soon as she was free, she left for Chicago,” he added. “When the war was over, slaves had heard about the North. She probably just wanted to forget about the whole ordeal and get out of here.”