Freeport's Find

At the southern end of the Mississippi Delta, in swampland that is four feet under water at high tide, Freeport Sulphur Co. has struck the biggest sulphur bed discovered in the past 20 years. From these new deposits at Garden Island Bay, La. (see map), Freeport expects to mine 500,000 tons of brimstone (pure sulphur) a year by 1953. The effect of this announcement last week was electric. Overnight, Freeport's stock shot up as much as 19 points, to 120, the highest price in the company's history.

The biggest news in Freeport's strike was the fact that it will soon put the U.S., supplier of 50% of the world's sulphur, in a position to whip one of the world's most critical shortages. Sulphur, vital to the production of everything from explosives and steel to newsprint and rayon, is as essential to industry as salt is to food. While the U.S. is now producing 6,000,000 tons a year, the world demand is now running 1,000,000 tons a year ahead of the total world supply of 11,700,000 tons. The new source, plus 530,000 tons from expansion already under way by U.S. producers, will break the world's sulphur shortage within two years.

Brimstone Battle. The find was another feather in the cap of Manhattan Multimillionaire John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, 47, capitalist, Yaleman, sportsman (polo and racing), soldier (Air Forces colonel), connoisseur of modern art (TIME, Aug. 27), philanthropist, Broadway angel (Life With Father), public servant (president of New York Hospital), and husband of one of the famed Cushing sisters (Betsy, ex-wife of James Roosevelt). Whitney is Freeport Sulphur's chairman and biggest stockholder. Along with Freeport's President Langbourne M. Williams Jr., 48, he got control of Freeport when both of them were still in their twenties.

Williams, scion of a Virginia banking family, went to work at Manhattan's Lee, Higginson & Co. after graduating from Harvard Business School. In 1929, after switching to his father's bank, he started a proxy fight to wrest Freeport's control away from a management he thought slipshod. Young Whitney, heir to an estimated $100 million fortune, had taken a $15-a-week "buzzer boy" job at Lee, Higginson rather than loaf. At the suggestion of his department boss, 25-year-old Whitney plunked a $500,000 stake into Williams' fight, enabled him to win the battle. Williams has run the company ever since, but says: "I always take all major decisions to Jock."

As novices in the sulphur business, learning it from scratch, the young partners knew enough to see that Freeport's resources were alarmingly low. They set out to find new sulphur beds, by the mid-30s had put the company squarely on its feet again with Louisiana's Grand Ecaille, Freeport's biggest mine, built the whole town of Port Sulphur (1950 pop. 2,250) to house the workers and ship the sulphur. Watery Mine. To get the brimstone out of the ground at Garden Island, Freeport plans to build a $10 to $15 million plant. Garden Island will be a watery mine.* Its power plant will be built on a forest of pilings. Its drilling rigs will be mounted on steel barges floated down a specially built canal. A new town will rise 17 miles north of the sulphur field and workers will be brought down to the mines by power launches. With a new mine abuilding in Bay Ste. Elaine, La., Freeport will boost its yearly output well over 2,000,000 tons a year (Texas Gulf Sulphur leads the world with 3,200,000 tons). With the demand for newsprint, fertilizer, rayon and other sulphur-users soaring year by year, Williams and Whitney see no limits to their future markets.

*50% of its profits will go to the Texas Co., which owns the oil leases on the land and found sulphur while drilling.

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