Henry Clay Frick (December 19, 1849 – December 2, 1919) was an American industrialist, financier, and art patron. He founded the H. C. Frick & Company coke manufacturing company, and later became chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company. Frick's management of Carnegie Steel was characterized by vehement opposition to unions, a trait reflected most notably by his violent suppression of the Homestead Strike. In the later years of his career as an industrialist, he was instrumental in the founding of U.S. Steel, which became the world's largest steel manufacturer.
In his life outside of the steel industry, Frick was a prominent investor who had extensive real estate holdings in Pittsburgh and throughout the state of Pennsylvania. As a founding member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, he was also in large part responsible for the alterations to the South Fork Dam that caused its failure, thereby leading to the catastrophic Johnstown Flood.
After he retired from business, Frick oversaw the construction of the Frick Mansion in Manhattan (now designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark). He bequeathed his extensive collection of old master paintings and fine furniture to create the Frick Collection art museum.
Frick was born in West Overton, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in the United States, a grandson of Abraham Overholt (Oberholzer), the owner of the prosperous Overholt Whiskey distillery. His father was of Swiss ancestry; his mother was of German ancestry. Frick's father, John W. Frick, was unsuccessful in business pursuits. Henry Clay Frick attended Otterbein College for one year, but did not graduate. In 1871, at 21 years old, Frick joined two cousins and a friend in a small partnership, using a beehive oven to turn coal into coke for use in steel manufacturing, and vowed to be a millionaire by the age of thirty. The company was called Frick Coke Company.
Thanks to loans from the family of lifelong friend Andrew Mellon, by 1880, Frick bought out the partnership. The company, renamed H. C. Frick & Company, ultimately employed 1,000 workers and controlled 80 percent of the coal output in Pennsylvania, operating coal mines in Westmoreland and Fayette counties, where he also operated banks of beehive coke ovens. Some of the brick and stone structures are still visible in Fayette and Westmoreland Counties.
Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie
Shortly after marrying Adelaide Howard Childs in 1881, Frick met Andrew Carnegie in New York City while the Fricks were on their honeymoon. This introduction would lead to a partnership between H. C. Frick & Company and what became the Carnegie Steel Company, until they were absorbed into United States Steel. This partnership ensured that Carnegie's steel mills had adequate supplies of coke. Frick, who was an effective manager, became chairman of the company. After the deadly Homestead strike, Frick and Carnegie came into conflict. Frick tried to sell the company to speculators. Carnegie made multiple attempts to force Frick out of the company without adequate compensation. Despite the contributions Frick had made towards Andrew Carnegie's fortune, Carnegie disregarded him in many executive decisions including finances. After Frick sued, they settled.
At the suggestion of his friend Benjamin Ruff, Frick and 15 other men founded the exclusive South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club high above Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
The club grew to more than 60 members, including leading business tycoons of western Pennsylvania. Among them were Frick's best friend Andrew Mellon; his attorneys Philander Knox and James Hay Reed; and his occasional business partner Andrew Carnegie. The club members made inadequate repairs to what was at that time the world's largest earthen dam, behind which formed a private lake called Lake Conemaugh. Less than 20 miles (32 km) downstream from the dam sat the city of Johnstown. Cambria Iron Company operated a large iron-and-steel work in Johnstown, and its owner, Daniel J. Morrell, was concerned about the safety of the dam and the thoroughness of repairs made to it.
The Club fatally lowered the dam by between 0.6 and 0.9 metres (2.0 and 3.0 ft). Poor repairs and maintenance, unusually high snow melt, and heavy spring rains combined to cause the dam to give way on May 31, 1889, resulting in the Johnstown Flood. A screen placed across the spillway by the club to prevent fish from escaping also partly blocked the main spillway. When word of the dam's failure was telegraphed to Pittsburgh, Frick and other members of the club gathered to form the Pittsburgh Relief Committee for assistance to the flood victims, as well as determining never to speak publicly about the club or the flood. This strategy was a success, and Knox and Reed were able to fend off all lawsuits that would have placed blame upon the club's members. With a volumetric flow rate that temporarily equalled that of the Mississippi River, the flood killed 2,208 people and caused US$17 million of damage (about $450 million in 2015 dollars).
The American Society of Civil Engineers launched an investigation of the South Fork Dam breach immediately after the flood. However, the report was delayed, subverted, and whitewashed, and finally released two years after the disaster. A detailed discussion of what happened during the ASCE investigation, its participating engineers, and the science behind the 1889 flood was published in 2018.
In 1881, Frick, already wealthy, took control of his grandfather's whiskey company, Old Overholt. Frick split ownership with Andrew Mellon and Charles W. Mauck; each owned one-third of the company. The family's whiskey company was a sentimental side business for Frick, and was headquartered in Pittsburgh's Frick Building. In 1907, as prohibition became more popular across the country, Frick and Mellon removed their names from the distilling license, although they retained ownership in the company. Upon Frick's death in 1919, he left his share of the company to Mellon.
Frick and Carnegie's partnership was strained over actions taken in response to the Homestead Steel Strike, an 1892 labor strike (technically a lockout) at the Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company, by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. At Homestead, striking workers, some of whom were armed, had locked the company staff out of the factory and surrounded it with pickets. Frick was known for his anti-union policy and as negotiations were still taking place, he ordered the construction of a solid board fence topped with barbed wire around mill property. The workers dubbed the newly fortified mill "Fort Frick". With the mill ringed by striking workers, Pinkerton agents planned to access the plant's grounds from the river. Three hundred Pinkerton detectives assembled on the Davis Island Dam on the Ohio River about five miles (8 km) below Pittsburgh at 10:30 p.m. on the night of July 5, 1892. They were given Winchester rifles, placed on two specially-equipped barges and towed upriver with the object of occupying the plant, to enable non-union workers to access the plant at a later date.
When the Pinkertons attempted to land, they were confronted by armed workers and their supporters. A large mêlée between workers and Pinkerton detectives ensued. Ten men were killed, nine of them workers, and there were seventy injuries. The Pinkerton agents were thrown back, and ultimately they surrendered and left town.
At Frick's request, the governor sent a force of 8,000 armed state militia under the command of Major General George R. Snowden, who took control of the plant from the workers. Frick issued an ultimatum to Homestead workers, which restated his refusal to speak with union representatives and threatened to have striking workers evicted from their homes.
Among working-class Americans, Frick's actions against the strikers were condemned as excessive, and he soon became a target of even more union organizers. Because of this strike, people like Alan Petrucelli had thought that he is depicted as the "rich man" in Maxo Vanka's murals in St. Nicholas Croatian Church, but the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka (which works to preserve the artwork) says it depicts Andrew Mellon.