Three blocks south of the Haas-Lilienthal House, the row of giant eucalyptus trees at the southwest corner of Octavia and Bush is a city-designated memorial to Mary Ellen Pleasant, who planted them outside her 30-room mansion in the 1870s. The mansion is gone; her trees and a sidewalk plaque remain.
Pleasant arrived in Gold Rush San Francisco and built a fortune through boarding houses, laundries, and investments, much of it managed in partnership with banker Thomas Bell, whose family occupied the mansion with her. Born into slavery by most accounts, she worked on the Underground Railroad, helped fund John Brown, and in 1866 sued a San Francisco streetcar company for refusing Black riders and won, a case cited a century later. The plaque calls her the Mother of Civil Rights in California.
The stop is the trees, the plaque, and a name worth knowing before you walk the mansion blocks uphill.
