The San Francisco history of California's first Black millionaire
SAN FRANCISCO -- In the 19th century, San Francisco was a land of opportunity. Most who rushed there were dreaming of riches while others yearned for freedom but one woman set her sights on both and became an important yet unsung player in the fight to end slavery.
Every day, people drive past a row of trees on Octavia Street in San Francisco not knowing its connection to Black history or to the extraordinary woman who planted them.
Artist Cheryl Derricotte was researching eucalyptus trees in San Francisco when she happened upon the smallest park in the city, a tiny 8x10 memorial to a woman she had never heard of: Mary Ellen Pleasant.
"This stand of eucalyptus trees was actually planted in what would have been her front yard in the 1800s," Derricotte said.
A former domestic servant, Pleasant arrived from New England at the start of the Gold Rush with a keen eye for business.
"She realized, with so many people coming over, it would be a great place for them to settle," Derricotte said. "She could open businesses like the ones she had learned how to run in the New England states."
Pleasant opened countless service businesses -- boarding houses, laundries, restaurants, even brothels. She quietly became a major property owner in the city, but, because a Black woman had few rights, everything she purchased was under the names of White business partners.
That included Thomas Bell, co-founder of the Bank of California, with whose family Pleasant shared an opulent mansion on Octavia Street. Often masquerading as a domestic worker, Pleasant listened in on conversations, gathering valuable information from some of the city's most affluent residents.
Derricotte says that helped Pleasant gain a distinction of her own.
"(Pleasant was) the first millionaire -- we believe -- the first Black millionaire in the state of California," Derricotte said.
In fact, Pleasant secretly amassed a fortune of $30 million -- nearly three-quarters of a billion in today's dollars -- using it to help fund the Underground Railroad for people fleeing slavery back East. As astounding as that may be, Black historian John Templeton said she had another, hidden agenda that may have changed the course of the entire nation.
"Mary Ellen Pleasant was part of an international network that was devoted to ending slavery in the United States and she is probably the single most important person in their success," Templeton said.
According to Templeton, Pleasant moved to California not just to generate money but to help incite a war that would end slavery. She gave $30,000 -- nearly a million dollars today -- to abolitionist John Brown to fund his famous attack on Harpers Ferry in West Virginia.
"Harpers Ferry was the precipitating event for the Civil War. So, she specifically caused the thing that led to the Civil War," Templeton said.
When the Civil War began, California was governed by pro-Southern politics but Templeton said that changed in 1862, thanks to the monetary might of San Francisco. The wealth of the Golden State suddenly became available to the Union war effort.
"The deciding factor in the Civil War was California's gold," he said. "She was the one that turned California's wealth to the Union."
This unhearalded woman, who may have helped start the war that would end slavery, eventually died penniless, relying on the hospitality of old friends.
She lies now in a cemetery in Napa, under a headstone bearing an inscription Pleasant herself requested: "She was a friend of John Brown."
In San Francisco there is a living tribute, the eucapytus trees she planted. They offer passers-by shade, courtesy of a woman who changed history working from the shadows.
Templeton said there is currently an effort underway to have the six eucalyptus trees at Octavia and Bush streets added to the National Register of Historic Places.
