In the early 1900s, the pine forests of Morehouse Parish turned into money, and Bastrop spent it in brick. Lumber and paper mills gave the town its shape, and the ornate commercial storefronts that still line the downtown blocks are what certainty looks like when it gets pressed into masonry — buildings put up by people who believed the boom would last. At the center, the 1914 Morehouse Parish Courthouse anchors the square. A few blocks off, a Russian immigrant named Charles Snyder built his family home in 1929; the Morehouse Historical Society converted it to a museum in 1972, and it now holds the parish's paper trail — genealogy records, photographs, working farm implements in the Carriage House out back. What the mills built, the archive preserves. The brick is still standing. The records are still open.
