How did Sulphur, Louisiana get its name? Not from a rotten egg smell.

Sulphur is that little Calcasieu Parish town with a funny name.

But is there more to the story of Sulphur than its funny name?

Dee Jeffers, of Baton Rouge, says she has always known there's more to the story, and she believes she's joined by a lot of Louisianans in her curiosity.

"What's the story behind Sulphur and its name?" she asked.

Turns out Suphur's story is big. How big? Try this: Sulphur once was majority producer of the world's sulfur supply. 

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"It was an international trade," said Thom Trahan, executive director of Sulphur's Brimstone Museum. "At the time that this was going on, the amount of sulfur they were producing out of this mine broke the world market. I mean, they were producing more in one little city than they were producing around the rest of the world combined. It was massive."

As for the spelling of the city's name, the mineral can be spelled either "sulphur" or "sulfur." Though "sulfur" is the more common spelling, the Union Sulphur Co., a joint venture of Herman Frasch and the American Sulphur Co., based its operation in the Louisiana city.

Hence, the "sulphur" spelling.

"So basically, our town got its name from the mineral itself," Trahan said. "It was famous for sulfur mining from the the 1890s to the 1920s."

Trahan says that from the 1870s to the 1890s, a big search for petroleum along the Gulf Coast was happening.

He explains that the oil companies were "coming into their own," finding oil deposits all along the Gulf Coast.

"Oil was discovered in our area, but it was underneath a sulfur capstone," Trahan said.

So, when the oil emerged, it was contaminated with sulfur deposits, which made it the so-called "sour crude," which wasn't as profitable in those days because it had to be processed to remove the sulfur from the oil before it could be sold. 

The oil companies lost interest in the area, but Herman Frasch kept it on his radar. That name again, Frasch. Sulphur once had a hotel named for him, and the city park and elementary school still bear his name — for good reason.

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"Frasch was a German chemist in New York, and he already had several patents to his name, and he actually had a patent for the desulfurization of oil — the removing of sulfur from crude oil," Trahan said. "But he had heard about this little town in southwest Louisiana that had a sulfur deposit that was underground and unable to be mined using regular methods like shaft mining."

Why? Because the state's natural terrain didn't allow for it.

"Obviously in Louisiana, we have a lot of swampland," Trahan said. "We have a lot of low areas with a high water table, and so to try to dig an actual mine, like coal miners or gold miners would do in other states, you just can't do that here. We don't have that kind of landscape."

Frasch began playing with the idea of pumping sulfur from the ground instead of mining it. The sulfur was solid, but Frasch had a theory.

"He patented this idea of pumping superheated water down into this sulfur dome, this capstone," Trahan said. "Sulfur is an unusual mineral in that it melts at a really, low temperature when compared to metals or limestone."

Frasch put his theory into action. Water was heated beyond the boiling point yet not to the point where it would turn into steam. The water was pumped into the sulfur deposit then pumped out as a liquid.

"Sulfur doesn't mix with water like salt and sugar do," Trahan said, explaining that elemental sulfur is known to be insoluble in water. "It would melt to a liquid form but not dissolve in the water — so they could pump it out up to the surface."

Once the miners got the sulfur to the surface, they would let it cool and then it would become hardened again in its mineral form and would be broken into pieces and shipped around the world. 

The mineral sulfur is used for many purposes — including making car batteries, fertilizer, oil refining, water processing, mineral extraction, in the rubber vulcanization process, in the bleaching paper process, to make cement, to make detergents and to make pesticides.

The largest usage of raw sulfur is to make sulfuric acid, the world's largest volume industrial chemical, and is considered to be one of, if not the most important chemicals manufactured.

Because of Frasch's idea and the eventual mining of sulfur, the community, which started out with a population of 1,000, became an international player. Once Union Sulphur Co. set up operation, the population quickly grew to 5,000 people, most of whom lived on company grounds. The Union Sulphur Co. had exclusive access to the sulfur mining technology.

"And that started here in Sulphur, in southwest Louisiana," Trahan said. "That's the first time that method was used in the world. So, that's our international fame for a brief blip in history, because of this mineral production."

The company eventually expanded its reach as it discovered other sulfur deposits in areas south of Sulphur. Other companies jumped on the technology when Frasch's patent expired in the 1920s.

The mines where the sulfur was pumped from the ground have since been capped and claimed by forestland.

"They are north and just slightly west, about a mile-and-a-half outside the city," Trahan said. "If you go to Google Maps and look at the city of Sulphur and then zoom out a little bit, you'll see a large, round like blemish that looks like a lake and forestation just to the northwest of our city. That's where the site was."

The oil companies eventually returned with better technology to clean sulfur from sour crude and began drilling.

Today, Sulphur's population is just beyond 20,000, with surrounding oil refineries and petrochemical plants as its biggest employer.

Though Hurricane Laura wiped out the train depot that was home to the city's Brimstone Museum, the museum continues to preserve the area's story in nearby historical buildings.

To learn more, visit brimstonemuseum.org.