The choice of location was not accidental. Spring Street was becoming the commercial center of Los Angeles as the city grew. Property in this corridor would appreciate in value as the city developed around it, and that appreciation ultimately produced the wealth that made Mason’s later philanthropy possible. Whether Mason anticipated the scale of that appreciation is impossible to know; what can be said is that she chose a location in what was becoming the city’s core.
She could not have purchased the property without savings accumulated over ten years of paid work as a midwife and nurse. She could not read or write, which means the transaction was conducted with the assistance of others who could manage the paperwork. The legal right to hold property in her own name as a free Black woman was real but required navigation: transactions had to be properly documented, deeds had to be recorded, and the legal infrastructure of property ownership had to function reliably in her favor.
The purchase appears in records. It was real, documented, and consequential.
## The City Grows Around Her
In the decades following her property purchase, Los Angeles began its transformation from a small post-Mexican-War town into a city with regional and eventually national significance. The population grew, land values rose, and the Spring Street corridor where Mason had invested appreciated substantially.
By 1878, sources indicate that she was wealthy enough to sell portions of her property for approximately ten times their original purchase price. The specific figures are not fully documented in the surviving primary sources, and the prompt for this article appropriately cautions against unsupported dollar valuations. What is established is the general pattern: property bought in the 1860s in what became the city’s commercial center was worth substantially more by the late 1870s and 1880s.