Mary was born July 4, 1845, and the tragic death of her father in 1859 left a lifelong shadow over her life.
Lemuel Carpenter had borrowed $5,000 from John Downey and James P. McFarland, druggists, in 1852. At the exorbitant interest rates of the times, his debt was $104,000 by 1859.
Four days before his land was to be sold at sheriff’s auction, Carpenter put a bullet through his head.
Two months after her father’s passage, Mary began a diary. She had spent Christmas, 1860, at the home of her aunt and uncle, William and Maria Wolfskill, who lived on Alameda Street in Los Angeles.
In her first diary entry she mentions visiting the grave of her father that day. She was only 14, but she kept a total of six diaries which ran through 1865.
Mary and other members of her family attended a private school maintained by her uncle for his own and his friends’ children. This, and later schools, allowed her to earn a certificate to teach in the primary schools of Los Angeles County in 1866.
Among those she met in the social whirl of the Wolfskill home was Joseph Edward Pleasants, a friend of Wolfskill from Solano County above San Francisco.
Mary and Pleasants were married in 1868, at the Plaza Church in Los Angeles, by Father Francisco Moro.
Pleasants owned 100 acres of the old Santa Gertrudes Rancho that had once belonged to her father. He had purchased it from the now ex-governor, John Downey, who had picked up the rancho in the sheriff’s sale.
Pleasants had lost his Downey vineyards and orchards to a huge flood in 1866. But on marriage to Mary he moved with her to a homestead in Santiago Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. They lived there until her death from consumption in 1888.
Her earlier diaries depict the love and loss she felt at her father’s death. Jan. 3, 1860, "The day was very clear but towards the evening the clouds began to gather. Last night I saw my father in my dreams. I was not happy."
On Tuesday, July 4, her birthday, she wrote a stirring entry. "How little do we think how kind our heavenly father is. We do not think that he could take our lives any moment he wished. Oh how ungrateful we are. Today I am 15. Will I be in the world next year, the 4th, only my heavenly father knows. Thy will be done. I was more sad than happy all day. After dinner they danced. I danced two times, then laid down on the sofa. Went to sleep. Woke up and found myself all alone."