Jim Bradshaw: Sulphur made fortunes and kept roaches away

It was big news across south Louisiana when the Union Sulphur Co. announced in January 1925 that its fabulous mines in Calcasieu Parish had been shut down.
History and an incredible fortune had been made there from what the Lake Charles Echo called in 1871 “an inexhaustible bed of virgin sulphur.”
But, more than 50 years after that optimistic assessment, the company said everything that could be profitably produced had been taken from the “inexhaustible” dome.
Industry chronicler William Haynes described that dome just west of the town of Sulphur as “some fifty acres … [that] rises quite abruptly from the marshes. … An oasis of dry ground surrounded by swamps; an open clearing in the midst of a jungle of cypress and pine all festooned with Spanish moss.”
“Upon this little stage,” Haynes wrote, “the American sulphur industry was born.”
This little stage was also my first home, although the incredible story was nearing its end when my parents lived in a company cottage within walking distance of the long, wood-frame office where my dad worked as an engineer.
The story that caused that community to be created began in late December 1894, when scientist Herman Frasch and mining engineer Jacques Toniette first tried melting the sulphur below ground and pumping it up, rather than digging it out.
Digging had been tried several times, but a layer of quicksand just above the sulphur had foiled those attempts and bankrupted  companies who’d tried that way.
Frasch, a research chemist, thought that with enough pressure and heat, he could pump melted sulphur to the surface.
He tried out his idea that December, and it worked, but it took a lot of fuel to heat water enough to melt the sulphur and run pumps strong enough to handle the sluggish stuff.
His Union Sulphur Co. struggled financially until oil was discovered in 1901 at the Spindletop Field just across the Sabine River. That provided abundant, cheap fuel nearby, and the company began to make money — lots of money.
For a decade or more the company paid 100% dividends on every share of stock, not just every year, but every month — plus Christmas bonuses, extra dividends, and all of the taxes in Calcasieu Parish outside of Lake Charles.
At one point, the Calcasieu dome was called “the richest fifty acres in the United States.”
The company’s net earnings in the five years between Jan. 1, 1914, and Jan. 1, 1919, were $35,000,000, nearly $600 million in today’s dollars.
When production finally ended, nearly 10 million tons of sulphur had been produced there. It took two years to ship what was stockpiled on the ground. 
Our home was one of about 100 cottages built for married workers when some 2,000 people worked at Sulphur Mines.
I lived there in the late 1940s, long after sulphur mining had closed and the company had moved on to oil production, but huge pumping plants that once brought molten sulphur to the surface were still there, as were acres of yellow-covered pits where the sulphur had cooled.
A big hunk of it dominated my rock collection when I was a kid.
“The cottages formed a model little city equipped with running water, electric lights, screened windows and porches,” Louis A. Lynn wrote in his master’s thesis about Sulphur Mines in 1950.
“One dollar a month for each room in the house, with free water and electricity, was the charge.”
The company used payroll deductions for the rent, telephone service, and costs incurred at the commissary and ice plant.
The community had a company store, a hotel, and its own post office and fielded great baseball teams made up of company employees.
E. J. Busch, who was a corporate officer at Sulphur Mines when my dad worked there, recalled that one of the minor drawbacks of life in the little community was that “you couldn’t keep silverware polished. It would turn black in a day.”
On the other hand, he said, “People living at the mines didn’t have to worry about roaches or other bugs in their homes. The fumes from the mines were [a] built-in exterminator.”
The Sulphur Mines offices were closed about 1950 and moved to Lake Charles.
The cottages were maintained a few years longer. Some of them were moved from the site — I know of two still standing in Lake Charles — but many of them and most of the other buildings were torn down.
 The Union Sulphur Co. has changed names and merged and re-merged with a half-dozen other companies over the decades since and is now a division  of the energy giant BP.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.