Inside the Frick Fortune — Homestead, an Assassin's Blade, and the Museum He Left Behind

Before dawn on July 6th, 1892, three hundred armed Pinkerton guards sailed up the Monongahela River toward a steel mill sealed behind a fence its own workers called "Fort Frick." By the time the twelve-hour battle ended, at least ten men were dead. Seventeen days later, an anarchist walked into the mill owner's office and shot him twice in the neck before stabbing him with a sharpened file. He survived — and was back at his desk within a week. This is the story of Henry Clay Frick: a Mennonite farm boy's grandson who built a coke empire before he turned thirty, became Andrew Carnegie's most trusted — and most feared — partner, and orchestrated one of the bloodiest labor conflicts in American history. It's the story of the bitter 1899 split that followed, a feud so complete that when a dying Carnegie begged for reconciliation twenty years later, Frick's reply became one of the most quoted lines in American business history. And it's the story of what Frick left behind: a Fifth Avenue mansion, one of only three privately owned trios of Vermeer paintings in the world, and a fifteen-million-dollar bequest that became The Frick Collection, one of New York's most celebrated museums. Subscribe to The Velvet Ledger for more true stories of old money, and what happens when it runs out. #TheVelvetLedger #HenryClayFrick #OldMoney #HomesteadStrike #GildedAge