Nancy Green (March 4, 1834 – August 30, 1923) was an American former enslaved woman and one of the first African-American models hired to promote a corporate trademark as "Aunt Jemima". The famous Aunt Jemima recipe was not her recipe, but she became the advertising world's first living trademark. Biography Nancy Hayes (or Hughes) was born enslaved on March 4, 1834. Montgomery County Historical Society oral history places her birth at a farm on Somerset Creek, six miles outside Mount Sterling in Montgomery County, Kentucky. She had at least two and as many as four children (one of whom was born in 1862) with George Green. Local farmers from that area named Green raised tobacco, hay, cattle, and hogs. There were no birth certificates or marriage licenses for enslaved people. Nancy Green has been variously described as a servant, nurse, nanny, housekeeper, and cook for Charles Morehead Walker and his wife Amanda. She also served the family's next generation, again as a nanny and a cook. Walker's two sons later became well known as Chicago Circuit Judge Charles M. Walker, Jr., and Dr. Samuel J. Walker. By the end of the American Civil War, Green had already lost her husband and children. She lived in a wood frame shack (still standing as of 2014) behind a grand home on Main Street in Covington, Kentucky. She moved with the Walkers from Kentucky to Chicago in the early 1870s, before the birth of Samuel's youngest child in 1872. The Walker family initially settled in a swank residential district near Ashland Avenue and Washington Boulevard called the "Kentucky Colony", then home to many transplanted Kentuckians. On the recommendation of Judge Walker, she was hired by the R.T. Davis Milling Company in St. Joseph, Missouri, to represent "Aunt Jemima", an advertising character named after a song from a minstrel show. They were looking for a Mammy archetype to promote their product. At the age of 59, Green made her debut as Aunt Jemima at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago, beside the "world's largest flour barrel" (24 feet high), where she operated a pancake-cooking display, sang songs, and told romanticized stories about the Old South (claiming it was a happy place for blacks and whites alike). After the Expo, Green was reportedly offered a lifetime contract to adopt the Aunt Jemima moniker and promote the pancake mix; however, it is likely the