Mary Ellen Pleasant of Beltane Ranch was a woman steeped in mystery.
Born a slave, she amassed a fortune in her lifetime.
Some say she was a witch, others, a savior.
But history has a way of smoothing rough edges and remembering people for their accomplishments.
On Saturday, Oct. 11, the Sonoma Community Center will honor Mary Ellen Pleasant as this year’s Muse – not for being either sinner or saint, but for being one of the most colorful figures in the Valley’s long list of remarkable residents.
Her civil rights battles and her contributions to the Underground Railroad movement alone are enough to wipe away any stains on her character.
And there were a few, at least in the eyes of her contemporaries.
The exact date and place of her birth are unconfirmed. Those who have attempted to chronicle her life say she was born sometime after 1814 and before 1817, most likely in New Orleans, Louisiana. One biographer says she was the daughter of a “voodoo priestess” and a white man, either Asian or Native American. In a memoir, Pleasant claimed her father was the son of a Virginia governor, a claim biographers could never prove.
They agree she was half-white, half-black, and was indentured to a Quaker family in Nantucket at an early age (10 to 13). Working for the family, she was able to earn her freedom, and in the process she learned how to operate a business. Through her Quaker benefactors, she also became involved in the Underground Railroad, an organized effort to help slaves escape to free states and Canada.
It may have been through her work with the Abolitionists that she met James Smith, whom she married. Smith was a wealthy businessman, also engaged in the movement. When he died, he left her $45,000, a tremendous sum in that day and age and perhaps the seed money for her future endeavors.
Three years later, she was in business with another Abolitionist, John James Pleasant, whom most of her biographers believe she married, although there is no record. They moved to New Orleans and, in 1852, four years after the discovery of gold in California, they relocated to San Francisco. Pleasant went on ahead. His wife followed. Some biographers speculate the reason for the move wasn’t gold, but anonymity. Both were still involved in the Underground Railroad and were “scouting” new sites for relocating escaped slaves.
Pleasant, who was light-skinned, reinvented herself in the City. Her husband (if he was that) seems to have disappeared. With a new partner, Thomas Bell, she invested in many enterprises and was said to own mining operations, restaurants, laundries, boarding houses – even brothels. She also served as a caterer to the wealthy, making many contacts during the years the city was gaining prominence.
In a new history of Beltane Ranch, written by Arthur Dawson, and kindly loaned for this article by Alexa Wood, she is described as a shrewd woman who kept her ears open and learned where to invest her funds, making a fortune in the process. At one point, she and Bell amassed $30 million, an outrageous sum in the latter half of the 19th century. But fortunes were to be made in post-gold rush San Francisco, and not all of it was in mining.
Evidence suggests that Pleasant, known as “Mammy” in the black community where her race was not hidden, continued to support the slave relocation movement, placing many former slaves in influential households where much information was to be gleaned. From 1857 to 1859, she returned to the East Coast, helping John Brown of Harper’s Ferry fame, financially, and was nearly caught by authorities.
Returning to San Francisco, she resumed investing, living in a large mansion on Octavia Street with Bell and his wife, Theresa, a much younger woman she had introduced to him. In the post-Civil War days, she decided to stop hiding her race. So the living arrangement would not seem odd to a class-conscious San Francisco society, she claimed to be the Bells’ housekeeper.
“Out,” she could now spend her money on new causes.
After she and two other women were ejected from a streetcar, she filed suit and won. The case outlawed segregation on streetcars in California. Other civil rights victories followed. One of these, upheld in a court case as late as the 1980s, earned her the title “Mother of Civil Rights in California.”
Her investments in property came late in life. In 1891, she and the Bells began buying homesteads in Sonoma Valley. One was the Drummond Ranch, which Pleasant renamed Beltane Ranch. A few months after this purchase, Thomas Bell died under mysterious circumstances – a fall from a staircase in the San Francisco house.
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