Photo of Morley courtesy of the West Baton Rouge Museum.

August 2011. There’s more than you’d think going on in the backest part of “Back Brusly.”

“Just like people, towns are born and towns die. In 1907, Horatio Throop Morley left his comfortable lifestyle in Michigan to carve out a new life and a new enterprise in the swamp six miles west of Brusly in West Baton Rouge Parish. He gave birth to a community that would bear his name and the community of Morley would thrive for nearly twenty years, surviving just slightly longer than its namesake.”

So opens an uncredited essay fronting a packet of material about the lost town of Morley, handed to me by Floyd Prejean on the back porch of the Morley Marina, a bar Prejean has owned for eighteen years down at the dead end of Choctaw Road in Brusly. The story has it that “H. T. Morley turned down an offer in 1915 from a then penniless friend in Michigan, Henry Ford, to join him as an investor in his struggling car company.”

Horatio and his brother Lawrence instead made a significant amount of money—$7 million—in the cypress logging enterprise out in what is now known as “Back Brusly,” on 17,000 acres that their father  (“a carpetbagger,” states the article ) acquired during Reconstruction. Among the documents in Mr. Prejean’s dossier is a listing of the holdings of the Morley Cypress Company, including:

One complete band saw mill, with nine foot band saw, in fine running order

25 dwellings for white laborers in white town

107 homes in negro town

One large store

One ice house

One dance hall

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