ABOUT US

The History

Swampland Cypress Lumber Company is owned by me, Joshua Moser, a local resident of Bayou Dularge since I was 8 years old. Located on Bayou Dularge, we have been in business now for almost 22 years.

I can’t tell the story of Swampland without giving a bit of family history. My father was a pastor when I was born. A lay pastor, which means he had a job and also pastored a church. He owned a logging business when I was born, but, due to the failure of the timber market in the early 70’s, he lost his business and started working whatever jobs would be available to make ends meet while still pastoring a small Indian mission on the West Coast of the US. When I was 6 years old my family and I (Dad, Mom, two brothers, me, and a dog) moved to South Louisiana via Mississippi (Lived there for about a year). We arrived in Bayou Dularge in the winter of 1982. I was 8 years old, or turned 8 just after we got there. My Dad had taken a pastor position at a tiny mission church on Bayou Dularge and we moved in to one of the Sunday School rooms where we lived for about a year. I had the most amazing childhood growing up on the bayou. Everything a boy could dream of. Fishing, hunting, trapping, catching alligators, shrimping, etc. It was like living in a Tom Sawyer book. I made some amazing friends and grew up with people like no other on the planet. As the church grew we quickly outgrew the tiny church building that had been an Indian School in year’s past. We moved to having multiple meetings on a Sunday, but even that wasn’t enough to accommodate the growth of the church. In the year I was 12 years old the church decided it needed to build a bigger building. My father was against borrowing money and so we set out to raise enough money to build a church building. God provided in some really miraculous ways and we never had to borrow a dime to complete the project, a 10,000 square foot building with classrooms, a sanctuary, and a fellowship hall. One of the ways God provided for this project was through a man in Houma, La who donated 40 acres of cypress timber to the church to use for the building. I was 13 years old that year. Another older gentleman from North Louisiana brought down his somewhat portable sawmill and we logged and milled about 100,000 bdft of cypress lumber to build the building. It was then and there that I fell in love with the sawmill business. I worked the “Green end” of the sawmill and put on about 50lbs of muscle that summer. Making lumber from trees and then using that lumber to build things just brought happiness to my young heart. We worked 7 years to build that building with lots of help from brothers and sisters all over the US, both in labor and finances. In that time I started by own little remodeling company and had learned many great skills that would benefit me the rest of my life.

With a longing in my heart to one day run a sawmill, my Dad and I bought an old 1952 Corely Circular Blade mill, and, with the help of a friend, made it run. We used that mill to mill sills for the church building out of donated creosote pilings. It sat for several years after that and did nothing until one day a friend of mine and I, who were commercial fishing together, decided to try and use it to mill lumber for profit. It was not a very successful project, but it sparked our interest enough that we thought that maybe we should buy a more modern, easy to run sawmill. I started a job in the oilfield which allowed me to afford to buy a brand new Woodmizer sawmill in 1998. We had an old tractor for logging and lots of determination and help from friends (One whom I married later on). We would end up renting a dozer to log with when the tractor would get stuck (1949 International Harvester). My partner and I eventually went in different directions and I kept the business. By that time I was working on a rotation in Algeria on a 28/28 rotation and I had lost my focus in the sawmill business. When my partner left I planned to sell the business, but my Dad proposed that he and I partner together and see if we could make it work. For the next 13 years my Dad and I ran the sawmill together, him and my by then wife, Rebecca (She worked on the mill for 7 years), being the main labor force and me providing financial support and falling trees. The business was never a great success, but it afforded my Dad something to do to stay busy and healthy, sometimes make an income, and we used the business a lot for helping people who needed homes and couldn’t afford them. Lots of times volunteer groups would come and help mill, stack, dry or plane lumber for building projects that the church coordinated. We eventually did develop a customer base and became known for the cypress lumber we produced. From 2005 until present I have lived and worked over seas with my family in the Middle East so I was limited physical support after that, but continued to finance operations and business expansion. In 2013 my mother passed away and my father retired from pastoring. He remarried shortly after that and moved about 2 ½ hours away near Baton Rouge. He was able to provide for himself running the sawmill, but we decided not to continue our business relationship together. I let him continue using the sawmill and skid steer we had then to pursue a business in Baton Rouge and I bought another used one nearly identical to the one we had to begin with. We retained the original name of the business “Swampland Cypress Lumber Company”.

Over the course of the next few years I had multiple people run the mill with varying degrees of success, but we managed to keep the doors open, providing our customers with the quality cypress and hardwood lumber products that we had become known for. We expanded the business to include a drying kiln and a planer mill allowing us to produce finished products for our customers to use in their projects from framing lumber all the way to siding, ceiling, flooring, and molding. In 2018 a friend, Joby Verret, a native of Bayou Dularge, who had previously worked at the sawmill as a teenager through high school, came on board and eventually took over as the Operations Manager of Swampland Cypress Lumber Company. Since that time the company has grown and business increased to where we are today.

Today we are a full service sawmill providing a complete range of cypress and hardwood products as well as custom milling services. We are located in the same place we have been for almost 22 years, 853 Bayou Dularge Rd. We are a proud part of the Bayou Dularge community serving it and the surrounding areas to meet their lumber needs. Thank you Dularge and the rest of our customers for supporting your local sawmill for these 22 years.

Joshua Moser, CEO and Owner

Swampland Cypress Lumber Company