Joseph Peake was born in Pennsylvania in 1792 and came to Ohio in 1809 with his parents and brother, becoming part of the first African American family to settle permanently in the Cleveland area. He was the son of George Peake, a runaway slave from Maryland who fought on the British side at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 during the French and Indian War. George Peake, a man of some means and talent, invented a stone hand mill for grinding corn, a labor-saving device that endeared the Peakes to their neighbors in western Cuyahoga County. In the 1840s, Joseph Peake and his wife Eleanor, an African American from Delaware, bought land on the Mastick Plank Road and built a home nearby. Members of the Peake family were active in their community: Joseph voted in Olmsted Township elections, and Eleanor belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church, whose congregation met in the Union House of Worship at the eastern end of Butternut Ridge Road. In 1843, northern anti-slave Methodists formed the Wesleyan Church, and four years later the Olmsted Wesleyans built their own church in the northwestern part of the township. Known for hiding runaway slaves in their homes and churches in defiance of the law, the Wesleyans were joined, according to stories told by neighbors, by the Peakes in helping escaped slaves traveling from Oberlin to Cleveland. The former Wesleyan Church is preserved at Frostville.