Carnegie Steel Company, Ltd., The, Strike & Riot of 1892, 2 vols. – Ancient Order of Hibernians
(June 2 – July 23, 1892 & August 16 – October 27, 1892)
Description
The Henry Clay Frick Business Records contain material reflecting the business and financial activities of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) with particular relevance to Pittsburgh and the western Pennsylvania region. These materials highlight Frick’s ascent into prominence during a period of American industrial growth. Frick especially kept in frequent correspondence with Andrew Carnegie among many others as noted in the collection material. Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), industrialist and art patron, was born in West Overton, Pennsylvania, a rural village about 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. His grandfather, Abraham Overholt, owned a farm and distillery in the middle of the Pittsburgh Coal seam in the Connellsville region of Fayette County, Pa. At the age of 21, Frick realized the potential of the bituminous coal found in the area and borrowed money to form a partnership, Frick & Company, a coal and coke-producing firm. Due to the growing demand for coke in Pittsburgh’s growing steel industry, Frick was extremely successful and soon controlled eighty percent of the state’s coke output. Frick seized the opportunity during the Panic of 1873 to buy out his competitors, drawing the attention and business of Andrew Carnegie and his budding steel empire. By 1879, at the age of thirty, Frick had made himself a millionaire. Carnegie brought Frick on as chairman of Carnegie Brothers & Company and Frick quickly organized all of Carnegie’s industrial interests into the world’s largest coke and steel firm, the Carnegie Steel Company. Immediately Frick was left to manage the company’s 1892 labor struggles, which was immortalized as the Battle of Homestead. Along with anarchist Alexander Berkman’s attempt on his life soon after, the fallout of the strike drove a wedge between Frick and Carnegie. As the years went on, he continued to have countless disputes with Carnegie which eventually resulted in Frick’s resignation from the company’s board in 1899. In the early 1900s, Frick was involved in the formation of the United States Steel Corporation and built a large coke and steel plant in Clairton, Pa., called St. Clair Steel Company, while simultaneously investing in mining firms in West Virginia, Colorado, Wyoming, and central Peru. Frick also made several major real estate investments in downtown Pittsburgh, financing building projects which included the Frick Building, Frick Annex, William Penn Hotel, and Union Arcade. By 1905, Frick’s business and social interests had shifted from Pittsburgh to New York City. Upon his death in 1919, Frick left a fortune of nearly $50 million with more than eighty percent of the amount being donated to charitable organizations.
Description adapted from the holding repository’s finding aid; it may describe the larger collection that contains the AOH/LAOH material.
The AOH does not hold these materials. Access, reproduction, and rights are governed by the holding repository under its own terms.