Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919)
Early Years | Launch Slide Show!
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Adelaide and Henry Clay Frick on their wedding trip, Boston 1882 |
Henry Clay Frick was born on December 19, 1849 in West Overton, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, some forty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. He was the oldest son (and the second of six children) of John W. Frick, a less-than-enterprising farmer, and Elizabeth Overholt, daughter of a prosperous whiskey distiller. Frick received little formal education: “So badly were my services needed in the earning of the family living that I was allowed to go to school only in the winter months.” Frick’s rise to prosperity began close to home, when in March 1871, in partnership with a cousin, he invested family money to acquire low-priced coking fields and build fifty coke ovens. Within a decade, H. C. Frick Coke Company would operate some thousand working ovens and produce almost 80 percent of the coke used by Pittsburgh’s iron and steel industries — coke being the essential fuel needed in the smelting of iron ore, which was required in ever-greater quantities for the creation of steel.
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Portrait of Henry Clay Frick by Pach Bros., 1916. Click on photo for slideshow. |
Frick owned his first company at age twenty-two, earned his first million by the age of thirty, and entered into partnership with the steel manufacturer Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) in May 1882. For the next two decades, as the expansion of the railways created an increasing demand for iron and steel (the leading industries in America by the eve World War I), Frick dedicated himself to the joint fortunes of the H. C. Frick Coke Company and Carnegie Brothers & Company. When these two entities merged in 1892, Frick was appointed chairman of Carnegie Steel Co., Ltd., capitalized at $25 million and employing some 30,000 men.
Source: Colin B. Bailey, Building The Frick Collection: An Introduction to the House and Its Collections. New York: The Frick Collection in association with Scala Publishers, 2006 (available from the Museum Shop). |
