Clara Bedell a.k.a. “Diamond Carrie” – Wealthy 19th Century Madam (1854-1891)

Gravestone of Clara Bedell & family

PLOT 14B

Today, the building at 201–209 Post Street, a block from Union Square, is associated with Prada and San Francisco’s luxury shopping district. In the late nineteenth century, however, this was the realm of Clara Cecelia Bedell, better known as Carrie Maclay—and best known of all as “Diamond Carrie.”

Bedell was an Iowa native who came from a farming family. By the 1880s, she was operating an expensive “parlor house” at 205 Post Street. Unlike the cheaper establishments clustered along nearby Morton Street—later renamed Maiden Lane—parlor houses offered elaborate furnishings, fashionable surroundings and carefully dressed women to a prosperous clientele.

201-209 Post St. today (Cushman Wakefield)

Bedell’s establishment extended through the block to 108 Morton Street, with the two buildings connected by a covered passageway across their second floors. Census records examined by San Francisco historian Peter Field indicate that eleven young women were living or working there in 1880, most in their late teens or early twenties.

For nearly a decade, Bedell managed what one newspaper called a “gilded palace of sin.” The same account described her as a woman of “considerable executive ability”—a grudging Victorian acknowledgment that she had built and managed a highly profitable business. Her lavish display of jewelry, particularly diamonds, gave her the name by which San Francisco remembered her.

Her story should not be romanticized. The nineteenth-century sex trade could be coercive and dangerous, and the limited evidence tells us much more about the women who managed its most visible establishments than about those who worked inside them. Nevertheless, Bedell occupied an unusual position. At a time when most women had little independent economic power, she controlled a substantial enterprise, accumulated a fortune in her own name and decided for herself how that fortune would be distributed.

In September 1891, violence entered her house. Beauregard McMullin, the 28-year-old son of a prominent Fresno-area family, arrived after drinking heavily and confronted a woman named Mattie Raymond, with whom he had become infatuated. He threatened to shoot her, but Raymond escaped. McMullin then turned the gun on himself, dying in a room adjoining Bedell’s residence.

San Francisco around the time "Diamond Carrie" ran her business

Less than a month later, Diamond Carrie was dead.

According to the San Francisco Morning Call, Bedell had spent part of the day looking for another house because her Post Street lease would expire the following year. That evening, she drank champagne, returned to her apartments around three in the morning and apparently took opium to help herself sleep. Her housekeeper later found her unconscious beside a glass containing wine and opium. Several physicians attempted to revive her with a stomach pump and the customary antidotes, but she died early on October 16, 1891, at the age of 36.

Clara Bedell's death notice (SF Morning Call)

The coroner’s jury ruled the death an accidental opium poisoning. Later writers have wondered whether the overdose might have been deliberate, particularly given the recent suicide in her house and the fact that she had completed her will only four months earlier. The surviving evidence, however, does not establish suicide, and the contemporary legal finding was accidental death.Her handwritten will revealed the world she had built around herself. The initial probate filing valued her estate at approximately $25,000, consisting of jewelry, clothing, books, furniture and other personal possessions. She did not own the Post Street building; her wealth was primarily movable property and the accumulated proceeds of her business.

Bedell distributed jewelry and clothing among several female friends and relatives. Her “dear friend,” former Nevada judge Richard S. Mesick, received her library, two paintings, a silver tray and pitcher, and two silver goblets—one reportedly engraved with his initials and the other with hers.

She left $500 and a gold-and-jet chain to a Chinese man named Jim, and $250 each to two other Chinese men, described in the racial language of the newspaper as her “Chinese boys.” The bequests are notable because Chinese residents faced extraordinary discrimination in San Francisco, and because Bedell recognized them individually in a will otherwise dominated by family members and close associates.

Her mother received the remainder of the estate, which was ultimately to pass to Bedell’s two sisters. Fannie Howard, who had helped operate the house, was instructed to continue the business until the lease expired. Howard would receive one-half of its profits, with the other half going to Bedell’s mother, as well as a separate bequest of $1,000. Bedell also directed that her body be cremated—still an uncommon request in 1891.

What was $25,000 worth? A straightforward comparison of consumer purchasing power places it at approximately $950,000 today. But because Bedell’s estate represented accumulated personal wealth rather than a single consumer purchase, economic historians offer another useful comparison: relative to the wealth of the country, her fortune would represent approximately $9.4 million today. There is no single perfect conversion across 135 years, but either measure demonstrates that Diamond Carrie died a wealthy woman. 

Some later reports placed the estate closer to $50,000. Were that figure accurate, it would translate into approximately $1.9 million in modern purchasing power—or nearly $19 million when measured as relative wealth.

Her death did not end the drama.

Bedell’s father, Edmund D. Bedell, had been omitted from her will and was divorced from her mother. He challenged the administration of the estate, alleging that Clara had been addicted to opium, mentally unsound and improperly influenced by one of her sisters. Her parents and the public administrator became entangled in a prolonged contest over who had the legal right to manage the estate.

Judges criticized some of the appointments as irregular, and the dispute moved through the courts for more than a year. Her father eventually settled his claim for $2,250. The contents and business of the brothel were auctioned, reportedly to another local madam, Sadie Young. 

A later appraisal listed 23 separate pieces of diamond jewelry. There was also an extraordinary $10,000 life-insurance policy on Judge Mesick that he had assigned to Bedell in 1887. After her death, Mesick attempted to regain control of the policy, producing yet another lawsuit and ensuring that Diamond Carrie’s name continued appearing in San Francisco newspapers long after her cremation. 

Sources: The San Francisco Call Bulletin, FoundSF, Cushman Wakefield, Measuring Worth, San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle