This photograph shows the slave quarters at Jefferson Davis's Brierfield Plantation in Warren County, Mississippi. Brierfield was once part of Joseph Davis's plantation, Hurricane, located at David Bend on the Mississippi River.
Joseph Davis allowed the profits of Brierfield to go to his younger brother, but retained the actual real estate. After the war Joseph sold the property to former slaves in the Montgomery family, but it was foreclosed upon with the Montgomerys being unable to pay the mortgage due to crop failures and river flooding. The property then reverted the the heirs of Joseph Davis.
Jefferson Davis sued for the ownership of Brierfield, which he finally received in the early 1880s. While Davis primarily resided on the Mississippi Gulf coast at Beauvoir, he retained Brierfield through his death in 1889. Varina Davis and their children held Brierfield but never lived there after Jefferson's death. The peninsula plantation was basically turned into an island when a canal was carved from the property. The Davis house at Brierfield burned in 1931.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
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