In 1892, when she was seventy-seven years old, Mary Ellen Pleasant purchased a ranch in California’s Sonoma Valley. The grounds of her new home spanned more than 900 acres and were set against a backdrop of green mountains. The property had acres of crops and pastures, a lake, a horse-racing track, a vineyard, and several guesthouses. There she spent $50,000 ($1.5 million) to build a mansion after spending $100,000 ($3 million) to purchase the property from John Drummond, a famous California winemaker. She built it to resemble the mansions on southern plantations, with a wraparound porch and balcony held up by white pillars, where she was often perched in a rocking chair, enjoying the cool breezes of the California wine country.
Her ranch was her most public display of her wealth, and she used it to send up her critics. The papers had refused to call her by her given name since her streetcar trial, referring to her in print not as Mary Ellen but as “Mammy.” She hated the epithet and returned letters addressed to Mammy Pleasant without opening them. She had been born free in the North, but the race-baiting journalism spread rumors that she was a southern slave or voodoo priestess from New Orleans. “Some people have reported that I was born in slavery, but as a matter of fact, I was born in Philadelphia,” she said. Her plantation-style estate was perhaps a way of having a laugh at her detractors.
In 1892, as she was preparing to spend her first summer at her new home, she received a telegram from the estate of the former California governor, Newton Booth. He and Pleasant had remained fond of each other after he was elected governor of California and had kept in contact over the many years after he had left her house for the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. The envelope that was delivered to Pleasant contained a message inside: Booth was dead.
The letter said that one of Booth’s last requests had been that she attend his funeral. Booth’s death hit Pleasant just as hard as the deaths of her husbands had. She had met Frederick Douglass and John Brown and rubbed shoulders with the millionaires of San Francisco, but she believed that Booth was the most brilliant man she ever met.
At Sacramento City Cemetery, Booth was laid to rest in front of hundreds of friends and mourners. The cemetery was canopied with trees and cherry blossoms. Booth was buried in a plot underneath a tree with red blooms on its branches. As Booth’s pallbearers carried his coffin to his grave, Pleasant followed behind them with tears streaming down her face. She shook so heavily with sobs as they lowered Booth into the ground that she had to be escorted out of the cemetery. After the funeral, she went to stay at Thomas Bell’s mansion. Bell’s wife, Teresa, decided to spend the summer at Pleasant’s ranch, leaving Pleasant and Thomas to run their mansion and the staff.
At 8:30 p.m. on October 15, 1892, Thomas retired to his bedroom on the third floor of the house. Shortly afterward, Pleasant retired to her own room. At 10:30, after a loud crash, one of the servants discovered Thomas unconscious on the ground floor of the house, having fallen twenty feet from the top of the stairs. Doctors were immediately called, but he never regained consciousness and died at 1:30 a.m. The coroner came to the house to question Pleasant, and Bell’s son, Thomas Frederick Bell Jr., who was also in the house when Thomas Bell fell from the stairs. Teresa rushed back from Sonoma Valley after her husband’s death. “Mr. Bell had been ailing for about two weeks now, and had been in bed since last Monday,” Pleasant told the inspector. “He was badly run down, the doctor said, and besides he had trouble with his skin, that just kept him in torture.” The coroner questioned the servants at the house and the doctors who had treated him after the fall. After examining Bell’s body and reviewing his interview notes, the coroner ruled Bell’s death an accident.
Journalists showed up at the house almost immediately after Bell’s death. In headlines, they dubbed the mansion “The House of Mystery” and implied that Pleasant had killed Bell. Pleasant wasn’t shy about pushing back. “Of course we don’t know just how the accident happened, nobody does,” the seventy-eight-year-old Pleasant explained. “But we think Mr. Bell may have been dazed when he started down to the kitchen. I think he got to the bottom of the upper flight and then fell over the railing from the first step. The railing is low, and it would be easy to fall from the stairs.”
Bell was buried in a cemetery on top of a hill in the west of San Francisco. His estate, which consisted of railroad stock, mining claims, and about $1 million in cash, was valued at $30 million ($827 million). Bell left a third of it to Teresa and stipulated that the estate pay her a monthly allowance of $5,000 ($68,630) to care for their children. The courts later lowered that amount to $2,000 ($27,452).
Before Bell died, Pleasant asked Bell not to put her in his will, for she felt that he had paid her fairly when he was alive. She didn’t need anything else; she had her own fortune, which included real estate, boardinghouses, stocks, and cash, and she had a net worth close to a million dollars. She had been hounded by the press for much of her life, and she knew that her name appearing in Bell’s will would only lead to scandal.
After Bell’s death, Pleasant retired to her ranch in the Sonoma Valley. There she was frequently ill and bedridden. Visitors often came to see her and sent her flowers. “My bedroom looks like a florist shop,” she remarked from her bed.
In the years after Bell’s death, Frederick and Teresa mismanaged and bickered over his estate. They drained the accounts by spending and bumbling the investments Bell had left them. In 1897, as the estate was running out of money, Frederick took aim at Pleasant. He filed a lawsuit against her, claiming that she had mismanaged his father’s estate and insinuating that she had killed Bell by pushing him down the stairs. Pleasant was eighty-three and ailing when Frederick came after her. “This suit has been brought by Fred because some enemies of ours have urged him on, and his action is too shameful to speak about,” she told reporters. Having burned through his father’s money, Frederick laid claim to Pleasant’s, alleging that she had amassed her fortune by stealing from his father. “Thousands of dollars were being pilfered by Pleasant, a mammy in disguise,” he said. He asserted that Pleasant’s personal property, which he valued at $200,000 ($5.8 million), including an expensive jewelry collection, had been bought with money that had belonged to Thomas Bell.
The case divided the city, with African Americans siding with the elderly Pleasant and her claim that her money, property, and possessions were her own. Whites sided with Frederick’s contention that her million-dollar fortune was ill-gotten.
Teresa stayed loyal to Pleasant throughout the trial. In 1894, at eighty years of age, Pleasant had signed her estate over to Teresa. Her health failing, and with no heirs, she wanted Teresa to have the property and keep it away from Fred. During the trial, she and Teresa holed up at the Sonoma Valley estate. Teresa kept her young children there, where they rode horses and played in the orchards. “The girls think of nothing but horses and riding,” she wrote in her journal. As Fred’s case got under way, Teresa feared that Pleasant was going to lose everything. It had probably been a good idea to sign the estate over to her. “M.P. is out looking for bills in the Fred Bell case. I am in a state of dread,” she wrote in her journal. Three days later, Pleasant lifted Teresa’s spirits by buying her a fancy French hat. “It was quite an event. I have not had one in years!” Teresa recalled, remembering that her spirits had been momentarily lifted. In 1898, she returned the ownership of the ranch to Pleasant so she could take a loan out against it to cover her legal bills.
In April 1899, Pleasant and Teresa got into a fight. One afternoon, a neighbor came over to ask Pleasant to repay a loan he had made to her. Short on cash, Teresa told her not to pay him, but Pleasant insisted on doing so. “I have plenty more money,” she told Teresa. Teresa retorted angrily that Pleasant was repaying loans and still hadn’t deeded the estate back to her. “You blackmailer!” she shrieked. “I have a history of your evil deeds and I will mail them to the Bancroft library!” “You are a thief! You stole an armchair from my house on Clara Street!” Pleasant snapped back. The fight escalated into a screaming match, and both women called the police. When the police arrived, they told the women that they would have to resolve their grievance in the civil courts and left.
The next day the dejected Pleasant locked herself in the bathroom. Teresa smashed in the door and told her to leave. Pleasant packed two trunks with her things and departed the house. “She was snarling like a mad dog,” Teresa wrote in her diary. “I am glad, very glad, to go,” Pleasant said as she left. A crowd had gathered in the street to witness what was going on, and Teresa took pleasure as they watched “the great Mary E. Pleasant” being humbled.
Pleasant was not so easily defeated. She still had the deeds to the estate and the mansion in the city. After she was thrown out of the house, her creditors attempted to foreclose on her assets. However, they found that her assets were so entangled with Teresa’s that it would have been impossible to get anything out of her. Fred wondered if Pleasant had instigated her fight with Teresa and her eviction to foil her creditors.
Pleasant split her time between a cottage and a small house in San Francisco. In 1904, as she became very ill, she went to stay with friends of hers, the Sherwoods, in San Francisco. On the morning of January 11, she was in bed and sensed that death was near. “I do not harbor a vindictive thought against the people who have betrayed my friendship or maligned me, and, in going down to my grave, I forgive them all,” she said. “To my enemies, I say nothing, to my friends . . . I say: God bless you all.” Her thoughts in her last hours were not of money but of the fights she had waged for freedom. “James made me promise that I would devote a portion of the money he left me to the cause of freeing the slaves,” she said. “Before I die I want to let the world know how I tried to keep my promise.” In her final moments she asked her friends to sing an old church song. She hummed along and closed her eyes. Then her voice faded out and she died.
Pleasant left behind an estate worth $600,000 ($16.2 million). At her height, she had been worth more than a million dollars. She was buried under the shade of a big tree in a green meadow in a cemetery in Napa County, California.