Morrisonville

Morrisonville began with people freed from slavery near Plaquemine. Accounts differ on the date, from the end of the Civil War to the 1870s. Dow opened a vinyl chloride plant beside the town in 1958 and grew to 1,400 acres. Chemical pollution turned up in residents' wells in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1989 Dow announced it would buy every home, warning that refusers' land would be worthless. Families were moved in 1990; one account says many died before settling. This is the industrial corridor called Cancer Alley. A prayer shelter stands at the old church graveyard.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — 8.7 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 8.8 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Capitol Park Museum — 9.3 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 9.5 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Sardine Point / The Cut Off — 0.8 mi
• Gary J. Hebert Memorial Lockhouse — 2.2 mi
• Bayou Plaquemine — 2.2 mi
• Bayou Plaquemine (Plaquemine Lock State Historic Site) — 2.3 mi