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The Life of HENRY CLAY FRICK

Henry Clay Frick, the second child of John W. Frick and Elizabeth Overholt Frick, was born in a two-room springhouse on the property of his maternal grandfather, Abraham Overholt, in West Overton, Westmoreland County, PA. He was named in honor of Henry Clay the leader of the Whig party to which both the Fricks and Overholts belonged. While still in his teens, Clay Frick announced that he “would make more money than Grandpa Overholt,” who made a modest fortune from the manufacturing of flour and Youghiogheny whiskey. At an early age, Mr. Frick saw his opportunity in the coke making business and with a loan from T. Mellon and Sons was on his way to becoming a millionaire by the age of thirty. Eventually, his vast coke and railroad interests brought the “Coke King” into partnership with Andrew Carnegie, the “Steel King.” Their two companies, the H.C. Frick Coke Company and the Carnegie Steel Company, were consolidated into the Carnegie Company, which was later reorganized into the United States Steel Company. In 1881 Clay Frick married Adelaide Howard Childs, the daughter of Asa P. Childs. The Childs family, long established in Pittsburgh, were manufactures and importers of boots and shoes. Mr. Frick’s friend Andrew Mellon served as best man. Two years later the Fricks moved from the Monongahela House, Pittsburgh’s fashionable residential hotel, to Penn Avenue in the East End of the City. Six weeks after they moved their first child was born, a son whom they named Childs. Three more children were born in the mansion they called Clayton: Martha in 1885, Helen in 1888, and H. C. Frick, Jr. in 1892. The Frick family was thriving and Mr. Frick had achieved wealth and international fame but in 1891-1892 a series of tragic events forever altered their lives. In July of 1891, six-year-old Martha died: a death Mr. Frick mourned the rest of his life. In the summer of 1892, within a month of the Homestead strike, Mr. Frick was attacked in his office by Alexander Berkman a Russian immigrant and anarchist. During the attack, Mr. Frick was shot twice and stabbed three times. While home recovering from his wounds, four-week-old Henry Clay Frick, Jr. died suddenly. Shortly after the turn of the century, with Pittsburgh no longer the center of Mr. Frick’s business, the family moved to New York. Henry Clay Frick died at his residence on Fifth Avenue in New York City, seventeen days before his seventieth birthday. Mrs. Frick survived her husband by twelve years and died in 1931 at the Frick’s 104 room summer home, Eagle Rock, at Prides crossing, Massachusetts, on Boston’s north shore. Childs Frick graduated from Princeton University in 1905 and pursued his interest in the natural sciences. He served as a director and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In 1913 he married Frances Dixon of Baltimore and they had four children. Helen Clay Frick’s principal interest was in the collection and study of art. She was a trustee of the Frick Collection and founded The Frick Art Reference Library in New York, one of the largest libraries of its kind in the world. She returned home to Pittsburgh in May of 1981, and died at Clayton in 1984 at the age of 96. Under the terms of her will, her beloved birthplace, Clayton, was restored and opened as an historic museum in 1990.

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