Mary Ellen Pleasant's Blue Gums

The mansion is gone. The trees its owner planted are still on the pavement. Six blue gums stand in a row on the west side of Octavia Street between Bush and Sutter, and a round plaque set into the sidewalk says that Mary Ellen Pleasant once lived on this site and planted them. Pleasant, born in 1814, was a Gold Rush entrepreneur and an abolitionist. The plaque calls her the Mother of Civil Rights in California and credits her with supporting the western end of the Underground Railroad from 1850 to 1865. Her thirty-room house stood here. It has been demolished; the gums are what is left of it. She died in 1904, so the trees are at least 120 years old. Nobody has published the year they went in. The city's street-tree survey puts the largest at 57 inches across, about 4.5 metres round, and the smallest at 30 inches. In 1974 the row became a Structure of Merit, and San Francisco still lists all six as one Landmark Tree. The strip is known as the smallest park in the city. They are not the biggest eucalyptus in town; a 2010 landmark tour noted larger ones in the Presidio. That is beside the point. You come for the woman, not the timber, and these six are the one part of her home you can still stand beside. Our pin sits in the middle of the row rather than on one trunk.