How Mary Ellen Pleasant became one of the first black self-made millionaires in the 19th Century

Mary Ellen Pleasant may not be a household name, but her story rivals that of any great American entrepreneur. In the 1800s, Pleasant became>How she built a fortune

Born in 1814 (some biographers say she was born into slavery on a Georgia plantation, though she claimed to have been born free in Philadelphia), 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 since the end of the 18th Century. It was there that she learned to read and write and work in a shop, but she never had a formal education.

"I often wonder what I would have been with an education," Pleasant said in an autobiography published in 1902. "I have let books alone and studied men and women a good deal."

Indeed: 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.

White, wealthy men would have been dismissive of an African-American woman in their midst, and Pleasant took advantage of that, according to The New York Times.

Pleasant used her proximity and anonymity to pick up countless valuable investing tips by listening in on her employers' conversations. In fact, one historian posits the possibility that Pleasant worked as a domestic servant specifically to pick up on investment advice and juicy gossip.

"It's quite possible that the jobs she had as a domestic were a cover that she was using because she clearly made her money from investments," Lynn Hudson, who wrote the 2003 biography "The Making of 'Mammy Pleasant,'" told The New York Times.

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.

She also bought various local businesses, starting with laundries. By the 1860s, Pleasant was the owner of a prosperous chain of laundry businesses and a series of boarding houses — where she still often disguised herself as a servant to be more easily overlooked.