Joseph Davis sold his plantations to the man he had enslaved, and his brother Jefferson Davis sued the family for Brierfield and won

Benjamin Montgomery was sold in 1836 to Joseph Davis, a lawyer and cotton planter at Davis Bend who reportedly enslaved more than 200 people. Montgomery kept the books, ran the plantation store and managed the property. Joseph let his youngest brother, Jefferson Davis, settle on the Brierfield tract but never gave him a deed. Grant's army seized the plantations in the war, and Jefferson Davis spent two years in prison after it. Joseph, elderly and nearly insolvent, sold Hurricane and Brierfield to the Montgomery family for $300,000 on a nine-year mortgage. Joseph died in 1870. His will left Jefferson the mortgage income but not the land. Ben Montgomery died in 1877. Bad crops, low prices, floods and debt broke the Montgomerys, and the land reverted to the Davis estate. Joseph's heirs, his grandchildren through an acknowledged illegitimate daughter, claimed Brierfield. Jefferson sued them; the case is reported as Davis v. Bowmar, 55 Miss. 671 (1878), and Wikipedia says the suit ended in his favour in 1881, giving him title more than 40 years after he settled there. He died in 1889 and none of his descendants lived there. Ben's son Isaiah Montgomery founded the all-Black town of Mound Bayou in 1887. The river had cut across the neck of the bend in March 1867. Heirs of a Louisiana lawyer who bought the island in 1954 own it; it is a private hunting ground, and the Brierfield house burned in 1931.