Jaida Pastora

Per:6th
3-2-21

Mary Ellen Pleasant Assignment:

1.When she was separated from her parents, where did she go and what did she do?

- Pleasant was separated from her parents at a young age and sent to work as a domestic
servant for a white family in Massachusetts, where slavery had essentially been illegal.

2.Why did she work as a servant in California?

- Pleasant moved to San Francisco in 1852 during the Gold Rush California entered the Union
as a free, non-slavery state in 1850. There she worked as a domestic servant and chef for
wealthy businessmen.

3.What was the first business she bought?

- Pleasant was the owner of a prosperous chain of laundry businesses and a series of boarding
houses 

4.How much would she have been worth by todays standards. 

- Historians estimated their combined fortune to be over $30 million, a sum that today to

around $864 million.

5.Where did she learn to read and write?

- At a young age, she worked as a domestic servant to a wealthy family in Nantucket,

Massachusetts, where she learned how to read, write, and work

6.When did she move to California?

-  To avoid trouble with slavers for their abolitionist work, the couple moved to San
Francisco, California in April 1852.
7.How much did she make as a cook, and what did she do with the money?

- Pleasant reportedly earned roughly $500 a month as a cook when she first arrived in San
Francisco at the age of 38, and invested much of her salary and her savings in real estate and
other opportunities she overheard, including gold and silver mines.

8.Why did she put her investments under the name Of Thomas Bell?

- Pleasant also met a bank clerk named Thomas Bell who helped her pursue some of her
investments as part of what would be a years-long business partnership forged in order to
make both parties extremely wealthy. In order to avoid discrimination, or simply questions
about how a black woman could accumulate a substantial fortune, Pleasant reportedly put
many of her investments in the name of Bell who was white.

9.How much and why did she give John Brown Money?

- When Mary Ellen heard the news through the abolitionist network, she wanted to be a part
of it. Mary Ellen Pleasant provided him with the $30,000 she brought with her, and also offered
to travel to Virginia to spread the word among the slaves.

10.Why did local Whites in California get jealous of her?

- As a result she faced animosity and vicious rumors that painted her as merely

Bell’s mistress and denigrated her boarding houses as brothels while claiming she
practiced voodoo.

11.What did she do in 1865 after the civil war?

- Between the several boarding houses she owned and other financial investments, Pleasant-

amassed a million-dollar fortune by 1865. “She ended up having the most exclusive boarding
house in San Francisco,