Mary Jane Green

Survivor of Slavery

by Margaret Riddle

Once as a child, twice as an adult, Mary Jane Green had been sold, her family divided on the auction block in the dark days of slavery. We know of her life only from an article that appeared in the Everett Herald on May 5, 1911. She died one year later and was buried in Everett’s Evergreen Cemetery. Her caretaker in her final days was granddaughter Sarah Walker who had become a widow when her husband, a porter for the Great Northern Railway, was killed in the famous Wellington avalanche of 1910. Both Mary Jane’s and Sarah’s lives remind us that the large events of history are really, at heart, made up of many smaller, personal stories.


WLP Story Number 3