Ha!
lived in Louisiana near New Orleans (Westbank), and this is exactly...perfect!
Loved that.
A good and fun one and, as you say, a good history lesson.
That being said, I have to believe that it is apocryphal, as a line of possession dating back to 1803, even if a case of ‘adverse possession’ would be more than sufficient. The only reason that I am commenting upon this is because I once spent a summer vacation working for a law firm in Beaufort, SC, doing land title clearing. My memories of this are strongly tinged with eye-strain and headaches.
Beaufort, and its local Sea Islands area, was plantation country prior to the 1861 US Civil War (USCW) with moderate-size slave populations. However this area became the first land retaken from the Confederacy in November of 1861 (127 years ago) and all of the plantation owners fled inland from there. During the remaining occupation and the subsequent Reconstruction Period, lots of these land titles became quite ‘cloudy’ indeed. Many of the former slaves became land owners through adverse possession but never got formal titles and were almost always subject to prejudicial treatment in the South Carolina legal system. As family members moved about in the century following the USCW, problems arose in who owned what percentage of what?
This was largely an internal and relatively minor legal problem when it only applied to internal family ownership on minimally desirable real estate. However, in the 1950s, Hilton Head Island and Beaufort County started to become very desirable real estate for good weather, lots of water-front and low taxes. Then the law firms got very big and busy in trying to clear land titles from the prior years of neglect. Wills, ‘quit claims’ and non-resident owners of dubious addresses became an ongoing problem. Land titles, hand-written in a fine ‘Edwardian Script’ that is so foreign to modern eyes, compound the difficulties in doing title searches.
Just remembering those days of musty paper and poor lighting and deciphering fading ink reminds me why I did NOT pursue a potential career. Just another story out of history.
Great! Should be in every Title Lawyer’s and land man’s file cabinet.
Good one, but it’s been circulating since at least the early 90s. The Hurricane Katrina addition is a nice touch, though.
Sorry this story so fake
I heard this exact same land title story when I took my realestate license classes in 1976 in Southern California... It’s an old realestate joke that I think anybody that ever worked in it for any length of time heard
I knew what the story was gonna say even before reddit