Following the Civil War, during Reconstruction, a wealthy Michigan ship-builder named William B. Morley acquired acreage in West Baton Rouge parish, and created the Morley Cypress Company in the latter part of the 19th century. According to a family member, William and his sons, Horatio Throop Morley (better known as “H.T.”) and Lawrence M. Morley (better known as “L.M.”) had a fascination with Louisiana, having named one of their completed vessels “La Louisiana.” The Morley Cypress Company continued to increase its Louisiana holdings into the 20th century when the Morleys purchased swampland lots from Brusly resident Anatole Aillet in January, 1900.

In 1907, 50-year-old H.T. Morley left his successful business in Michigan in order to create a lumber mill in rural West Baton Rouge parish on the 17,260 acres owned by his family. He brought along his younger brother, L.M., an attorney, to help establish the venture. The mill, with its towering smokestack, was fully operational within two years.

Mill workers were called to work each day by the piercing sound of the mill whistle, which could be heard in Brusly. Laborers were paid twice each day – once before lunch, and once at the end of the day – in “local currency” – 10, 20, and 50 cent brass pieces, which could then be used to purchase goods and services within the town. This compensation method was also a common practice at plantations and sugar mills.

The process of cypress lumber production required a lot of manpower and intense physical labor. Hours spent each day in the mosquito-infested swampland could not have been pleasant. First, the timber had to be cut, then dragged and dumped into the slough to be floated to the mill or to pick-up points along Morley’s tracks.

The Morley puffer-belly engine and freight cars hauled the logs to the mill from the slough for processing. Approximately twenty miles of logging railroad wound through the swamp. By 1917, the mill produced 50,000 board feet per day. Finished lumber was loaded onto T&P train cars for shipment.

In addition to the Morley brothers, several mill management members were not local. H.V. Dunford, Superintendent of Logging, was from Michigan, and William Henry Woodcock, Morley’s “commissary manager” was originally from Liverpool, England. Other transplants included the Utley, Duval, and McKenyee families.

H.T. Morley’s single-handed control of the mill and town may have led to their demise. At the time of his death, his cypress mill enterprise had earned him over $7 million. Most of the cypress, however, had been depleted, and Morley’s plan to purchase hardwood to support a veneer mill for 12 additional years was never realized. Without Morley’s leadership, mill production, which had already slowed, ground to a halt.

Four months after H.T. Morley’s death, the mill and entire town were up for sale. In addition to all of Morley settlement buildings, the mill assets included 17,000 acres of woodland, two large skidders, four locomotives, sixteen track miles, two water tank cars, a pile driver, two motor cars, two wood cars, thirty-five log cars, five trash cars, a trailer car for coal and water, a caboose, a shingle car, a plainer mill, machine shop, a shed, a stable, a lumber yard, a large loading platform, seven head of mules and horses, and one complete band saw mill, with nine foot band saw. Unfortunately, there were no buyers. With the mill shut down, residents moved away, and houses were eventually either torn down or sold and moved to other areas.

On March 21, 1925 the Texas and Pacific Railroad filed a petition with the Public Service Commission to discontinue train service to Morley. Lawrence Morley sent notice that the post office at Morley would officially close December 1, 1925. He moved to Port Allen, where he became president of Port Allen Bank and Trust Company. By 1928, he had moved to Rochester, New York, where he died in 1935 as the result of an automobile accident. For a while, the Morley timber and oil leases in Louisiana were managed by a third Morley brother, William, a Michigan physician who never saw the property.