Stitching Together Fragments of Clues in a California Mystery Woman’s Life

Mary Ellen Pleasant was either a demon or a saint, a daring 19th century abolitionist who harbored runaway slaves or a blackmailer, voodoo queen and procuress who provided girls for rich men in San Francisco. She was born a slave on a Georgia plantation or a free woman of color in Philadelphia--it’s not known definitively which--sometime around 1815.

It was thought she was penniless when she died in 1904 in a dilapidated San Francisco apartment, although legal documents later showed she had $30,000 to $50,000 in real estate and $150,000 in jewelry stashed away.

“She is the most elusive personality--I don’t know what’s true about her and what isn’t,” says Rosemary Wood, founder of the Beltane Ranch Bed & Breakfast, near Glen Ellen in the Sonoma Valley 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. Wood does know that Pleasant bought the 985-acre ranch around 1890 and used it as a weekend retreat with her sometimes friend and protegee Teresa Bell. Like-minded travelers with an interest in this fascinating woman can visit several sites associated with her elsewhere in the Bay Area. Little is known of Pleasant’s parents, from whom she was separated when she was young. She was raised partly by a shopkeeper on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts and is thought to have married in Boston. When her husband died sometime between 1844 and 1848, he left her $30,000 to $45,000. Susheel Bibbs, author of “Heritage of Power” (MEP Publications, 1998) and creator of a multimedia touring show dedicated to Pleasant, says Pleasant studied voodoo in New Orleans before moving to San Francisco in 1852. There she worked as a cook, ran a chain of laundries, speculated in gold and silver, bought real estate and operated luxurious boardinghouses. Whether she provided women for her male guests is disputed.

Lynn M. Hudson, a professor of history at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and author of an as yet untitled biography of Pleasant to be published next year, said Pleasant “was in the business of accommodating very wealthy white men. She would have provided all kinds of services. But calling her a madam underestimates the extent of her enterprises.”

These included finding jobs for blacks newly arrived in San Francisco and fighting proposed laws that would have forced the extradition of runaway slaves from California. She also gave money to abolitionist John Brown.

Meanwhile, Pleasant had introduced San Francisco banker Thomas Bell to Teresa, and they married. Pleasant built a 30-room mansion at 1661 Octavia St. in San Francisco, at the east end of what is now Japantown. The Bells lived there with their kids and with Pleasant as housekeeper, financial counselor and, some say, Thomas Bell’s mistress. The dwelling, long since demolished, is marked by a plaque in a little park on the site.

A massive carved wood mantel from Pleasant’s Octavia Street residence is on display at the San Francisco African American Historical & Cultural Society Museum in Ft. Mason, between Aquatic Park and the marina. And devotees can see Pleasant’s recipes in the Mary Ellen Pleasant/Helen Holdredge Collection at the main public library’s San Francisco History Center on Larkin Street. Holdredge was a Pleasant devotee who wrote “Mammy Pleasant” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953), a fictionalized work based on her life. The library’s history center also has a bedspread that Pleasant crocheted in 1884 during a nationally publicized trial that pitted William Sharon--widower, mine owner and U.S. senator (Republican) from Nevada--against his mistress, Sarah Althea Hill. Hill claimed she was Sharon’s wife. Pleasant testified that she had seen a marriage contract between them. Sharon, who lived at the Palace Hotel downtown, told the court that he had paid Hill $500 a month to live at the hotel and have sex with him.

Sharon was co-builder of the posh hotel, which opened in 1875 and was largely destroyed in the great earthquake and fire of 1906. Still, if you visit the hotel, you can see artifacts and photographs from the old days.

Sharon eventually prevailed in the halls of justice, while Pleasant was reviled in the press as a witch. Gossip blamed her for the death of Thomas Bell in 1892, and Bell’s mentally fragile widow, Teresa, eventually turned on her too.

In 1899 Pleasant left the Octavia Street mansion for a ramshackle apartment on Webster Street, where she died five years later, virtually alone. A friend took her remains to Tulocay Cemetery, east of Napa.

A marker on her grave identifies Mary Ellen Pleasant as “a friend of John Brown.” What else she was we cannot know.

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Beltane Ranch Bed & Breakfast, 11775 Sonoma Highway, Glen Ellen, CA 95442; telephone (707) 996-6501, Internet https://www.beltaneranch.com.

San Francisco African American Historical & Cultural Society Museum, Building C, Ft. Mason, San Francisco, CA 94123; tel. (415) 441-0640, https://www.fortmason.org.

San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, Civic Center, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA 94102; tel. (415) 557-4567, https://www.sfpl.org.

Tulocay Cemetery, 411 Coombsville Road, Napa, CA 94558; tel. (707) 252-4727, https://www.tulocaycemetery.org.