When the Civil War ended, freed families founded their own towns along this stretch of the river — Morrisonville, Reveilletown, Sunrise — and held them for more than a century. People were born, married, and buried in them across five and six generations. They were among the oldest communities in the parish.
Dow Chemical built a plant next to Morrisonville in 1958. In 1989, just before a federal report on the plant's emissions, Dow offered to buy every house and acre — and made clear that those who stayed would be left with land worth nothing. About twenty families refused at first. By 1993 the town was empty. Reveilletown went the same way to Georgia Gulf in the mid-1990s. What is left of Morrisonville is the Nazarene Baptist Church graveyard and a wooden, open-sided shelter the company put up so families could stand with their dead when they come back to visit. The towns are gone. The people still come back. The graves are still tended. That part the plants could not buy.
