HENRY CLAY FRICK

Industrialist

Henry Clay Frick was born in 1849 in West Overton, Pennsylvania. In 1871 he organized the H. C. Frick Coke Co. Coke was an important ingredient in the manufacture of steel, and the region in which Frick organized, the Connellsville Coke region, produced a very high quality. In 1873 a financial panic allowed Frick to acquire other companies and ally himself with the Carnegie Steel Co., as well as become a millionaire by the age of 30.

Frick merged his coke interests with Andrew Carnegie's interests for the benefit of both. He was chairman of the Board of the resulting Carnegie Steel Company from 1889 to 1900. In 1892, the famous Homestead Steel Strike occurred, costing the lives of many people and setting the labor movement back decades. The violence was largely due to Frick's harsh labor policies, which caused him to bring in armed Pinkerton guards to try to break the strike.

Shortly after the Homestead strike, an anarchist, Alexander Berkmann, attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick in Frick's downtown Pittsburgh office. His fourth child, Henry Clay Frick, Jr., dies shortly after birth about this time as well. Frick and Carnegie had several disagreements after the Homestead Strike, beginning perhaps because of the way Frick handled it, or perhaps because Carnegie wanted it done that way but he let Frick take the blame. We don't know for sure.

Frick made several major real estate investments in downtown Pittsburgh, formed the St. Clair Steel Company in 1900 in Clairton, Pa. with the largest coke works in the world, and when Carnegie sold the Carnegie Steel Company in 1901, Frick played a major role in the negotiations which formed the United States Steel Corp.

He and Carnegie had problems which ended in a court battle, and he retired to New York City, though still serving as a director of the United States Steel Corp. Upon his death in 1919 he made a bequest to the city of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh, and he gave his New York house and its outstanding collection of paintings to that city. In 1998, American Heritage Magazine named him to its list of "40 Wealthiest Americans of All Time".