Henry Clay Frick: Johnstown Flood, Homestead Strike and an Assassin

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Henry Clay Frick was born in 1849 in western Pennsylvania, grandson of Old Overholt whiskey founder Abraham Overholt and son of a father with a string of failed businesses. He left Otterbein College after about a year and vowed at 21 to be a millionaire by 30. In 1871 he formed the Frick Coke Company to make coke, the purified fuel steel mills need, with loans from the family of Andrew Mellon. By 1880 he controlled 80 percent of Pennsylvania's coal output, and an 1881 meeting with Andrew Carnegie made him Carnegie's supplier and eventually chairman of Carnegie Steel. He was also a member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which owned an earthen dam holding back Lake Conemaugh above Johnstown.

The club lowered the dam nearly three feet for a wider carriage road and screened the spillway to keep fish in. On May 31, 1889, it collapsed and the flood killed over 2,200 people; members funded relief, agreed not to discuss the club, and fended off lawsuits by calling it an act of God. In 1892, running the Homestead mill while Carnegie was in Scotland, Frick locked out the union behind a fence workers called Fort Frick and sent 300 Pinkertons up the river by barge. The July 5 battle left 10 dead. On July 23 the anarchist Alexander Berkman shot Frick twice in the neck and stabbed him, and public sympathy shifted to Frick. He later sued Carnegie, helped found U.S. Steel and collected art in New York.

• A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers on the dam was delayed two years and left out the lowered crest and fish screen.
• Carnegie Steel vice president John G. A. Leishman grabbed Berkman's arm and spoiled a third shot.
• Frick later had Leishman eased out of Carnegie Steel's presidency through a diplomatic post in Switzerland.
• Frick and his wife Adelaide canceled their Titanic passage after she sprained her ankle in Italy.
• He died in 1919 and left Pittsburgh land and $2 million for Frick Park, $6 million to Princeton and the Frick Collection.