Millcreek Mayor Jeff Silvestrini plans to kick off Pioneer Week in Utah with unveiling new street signs designating 3205 South Street in Millcreek as “Chambers Avenue.” That street is the only unnamed avenue in Millcreek’s new City Center project between Highland Drive and Richmond Avenue and city leaders want to use the opportunity to honor early Millcreek pioneers Samuel and Amanda Chambers.
Millcreek, site of the Legacy of the Black Pioneer monument, had numerous Black pioneers settle in the area, including the Chambers family. “While many eventually moved elsewhere, Samuel and Amanda grew a prosperous farm in Millcreek that covered 30 acres,” said Mayor Silvestrini. “For over half a century they were stalwart settlers in this area and well respected in the community,” he said. “These pioneers are well deserving of a place of honor in the heart of our new City Center.”
Samuel Chambers is considered the most successful black farmer in Utah from about 1880 through the first decades of the 20th century. Born in 1831, in Alabama, he was separated from his mother as a boy and taken to Mississippi where he was kept as a slave until the end of the Civil War. He and his wife, Amanda Leggroan Chambers, came to Utah in 1870 as Mormon converts.
The small fruits—including currants, grapes, cherries, and gooseberries—that Chambers worked hard to cultivate on their Millcreek farm won prizes at local fairs. The farm produced many necessities for the family’s survival as well: chickens, eggs, peas, wheat, corn, cabbage, pork, butter, and molasses. The couple would deliver fruit and milk, butter, eggs, and chickens by wagon. People also came to the farm to buy currants and other specialties grown by Chambers. The farm sustained them for many years.
Samuel passed away in 1929, at the age of 98 years, joining his Amanda who died earlier that year. They are buried in Elysian Burial Gardens, Millcreek.
The ceremony, open to the press and public, will be at 10:00 AM on Monday, July 20, at 3205 South 1300 East. In addition to Mayor Silvestrini, brief remarks will be made by Jeanetta Williams (Utah Chapter of the NAACP), Robert Burch (Utah chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society), and descendants of the Chambers family.
