Morrisonville was a small town in Iberville Parish, Louisiana, United States that was contaminated with industrial

pollution Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change. Pollution can take the form of any substance (solid, liquid, or gas) or energy (such as radioactivity, heat, sound, or light). Pollutants, the ...

from a nearby

Dow Chemical Company The Dow Chemical Company, officially Dow Inc., is an American multinational chemical corporation headquartered in Midland, Michigan, United States. The company is among the three largest chemical producers in the world. Dow manufactures plastic ...

vinyl chloride Vinyl chloride is an organochloride with the formula H2C=CHCl. It is also called vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) or chloroethene. This colorless compound is an important industrial chemical chiefly used to produce the polymer polyvinyl chloride (PVC ...

factory. The town's residents — predominantly

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

— were relocated in 1990 to Morrisonville Estates in Iberville Parish and Morrisonville Acres in West Baton Rouge Parish by Dow.

History

The community had been founded during the 1870s by former

slaves Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...

freed from a

plantation A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. The ...

near

Plaquemine Plaquemine is a city in and the parish seat of Iberville Parish, Louisiana, United States. It is part of the Baton Rouge metropolitan statistical area. At the 2010 United States census, the population was 7,119; the 2020 census determined its ...

. A chemical factory producing vinyl chloride was set up on land adjoining the community by the Dow Chemical Company in 1958. Initially there was a

green belt A green belt is a policy and land-use zone designation used in land-use planning to retain areas of largely undeveloped, wild, or agricultural land surrounding or neighboring urban areas. Similar concepts are greenways or green wedges, which hav ...

separating the factory from the town, but the plant bought land from the town in 1959 and then expanded to cover , filling all the intervening space, so much so that the plant's loudspeaker announcements could be heard inside people's houses.

Pollution and relocation

In the 1980s and 1990s, chemical pollution was discovered in the town's wells. To avoid lawsuits, Dow decided to buy up the town and move its residents away to create a buffer zone around the factory. In 1989, just before the release of a federal report into toxic emissions from the factory, Dow announced that it was going to buy up all the homes and land in Morrisonville, and that if the residents refused their property would be worthless. Although about twenty families refused to move at first, by 1993 the town was eventually abandoned. All that now remains is the graveyard of the former Nazarene

Baptist Church Baptists form a major branch of Protestantism distinguished by baptizing professing Christian believers only (believer's baptism), and doing so by complete immersion. Baptist churches also generally subscribe to the doctrines of soul compete ...

and an open-sided prayer site, built of wood, provided by Dow for family members who return to visit the graves. The residents were transferred to newly built homes at Morrison Acres, but many died before they could settle in. The large number of

petrochemical Petrochemicals (sometimes abbreviated as petchems) are the chemical products obtained from petroleum by refining. Some chemical compounds made from petroleum are also obtained from other fossil fuels, such as coal or natural gas, or renewable sou ...

plants producing PVC in the surrounding area, an stretch between

Baton Rouge Baton Rouge ( ; ) is a city in and the capital of the U.S. state of Louisiana Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-sma ...

and

New Orleans New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans
Merriam-Webster. ; french: La Nouvelle-Orléans , es, Nuev ...

, first led to it being known as the 'Chemical Corridor' and later as

Cancer Alley Cancer Alley (french: Allée du Cancer) is the regional nickname given to an stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, in the River Parishes of Louisiana, which contains over 150 petrochemical plants and r ...

, and many other communities in the area have been similarly affected by

groundwater Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in rock and soil pore spaces and in the fractures of rock formations. About 30 percent of all readily available freshwater in the world is groundwater. A unit of rock or an unconsolidate ...

pollution and other toxic emissions.

References

;Bibliography *

External links

* {{Iberville Parish, Louisiana Ghost towns in Louisiana Populated places in Iberville Parish, Louisiana Dow Chemical Company African-American history of Louisiana 1993 disestablishments in Louisiana