By noon, the sky should have been bright. Instead, smoke turned it the color of tarnished brass. The smoke pressed into brick, clung to the damp wool of work shirts, and settled deeply into the lungs of the men leaving the mills. Many were immigrants, drawn by the promise of steady wages. Instead, they found themselves coated in soot, their shirts stiff with sweat and iron dust.
Pittsburgh in 1892 was producing half of the nation’s steel. The Carnegie Steel Company, with Henry Clay Frick at the helm, employed 3,800 men, both skilled and unskilled, in conditions that crushed bone and burned skin. They worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week. Some would never see old age. The city was called a “two-shirt city” — one for the mill, another for home, if you had a spare. That’s why the Pittsburgh potty existed: a lone, exposed toilet in the basement, where a worker could scrub off the grime before stepping upstairs. No walls. No privacy. Just a basin, a bucket, and cold water. Many of those older homes still stand today, their basements hiding the unglamorous relic of that era.
This is Henry Clay Frick’s legacy, not just in industry but in the very bones of Pittsburgh’s homes.
Miles away, the air was clearer. In the tree-lined enclave of Point Breeze, past soot-darkened churches and factory rows, Clayton stood untouched. Here, Frick’s 23-room mansion sat behind carefully pruned hedges. Silk curtains billowed in the breeze. The house had been electrified in 1888 — three years before the White House — its chandeliers glowing with both gaslight and new electric bulbs. The entire estate, purchased in 1882 for $25,000, was a world apart from the fire and steel that paid for it.
At Clayton’s entrance, a white-gloved butler opened the heavy oak door, ushering in guests from their horse-drawn carriages. Their coats smelled of cigars and fine wool. He led them into the waiting room, an opulent space nearly the size of a millworker’s home, where entire families squeezed into 400 to 600 square feet.
The Gilded, Not Golden tour at The Frick Pittsburgh begins here, but it does not linger on luxury. Instead, Dalena Collins learning and interpretive coordinator, asks a single question: “What does progress cost?”
She gestures around the room but does not wait for an answer. Instead, she paints a picture: “Imagine a servant here, rising before dawn to stoke the fire, preparing for a breakfast that she herself will never taste. Imagine too, a steelworker, lungs raw from the mills, hands burned from molten iron, earning pennies to feed his family.”
Mark Twain called the Gilded Age “a place where glittering superficiality often overshadowed the underlying struggles of the common man.”
The year 1892 unfolds in layers. In Clayton’s breakfast room, a man in a tailored suit reached for a glass of sherry. Frick sat at a table with Andrew Carnegie, the Mellon brothers, and Philander Knox — men whose fortunes shaped the nation’s industry, their combined wealth rivaling the economies of entire countries. Gilded picture frames lined the walls, their subjects frozen in time: French courtiers, Renaissance saints, sweeping landscapes.
By the time Frick moved into Clayton, he was already one of Pittsburgh’s most powerful men. His business partner, Carnegie, was wealthier, but Frick was unafraid to make ruthless decisions.
Collins describes the two as “frenemies, bound by ambition and an ever-growing tension.”
“Carnegie, the visionary, avoided dirty politics, preferring to let Frick make the tough, often brutal calls. Frick, eager to curry favor and to prove himself, carried them out with precision.”
Frick wasn’t born rich, but he married into wealth. Adelaide Howard Childs came from one of Pittsburgh’s most prominent families. Marriage gave Frick status. In a world where taste meant power, he attained both.
Back at the breakfast table, the conversation turned to labor. The strikes at Homestead, the workers demanding better wages and working conditions.
Frick leaned forward. His mind was already made up.
The battle lines had been drawn months earlier. At the Homestead Steel Works, a sprawling fortress of industry along the Monongahela River, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers — one of the nation’s strongest labor unions — had been pushing for better wages and fairer hours. But Frick, chairman of Carnegie Steel, had other plans.
Steel prices were high. Demand was booming. Frick wanted more production, lower costs, and no union standing in his way.
It began before dawn on July 6, 1892. The workers saw them coming. Three hundred Pinkerton’s agents came floating down the river on barges, Winchesters in hand. Frick had hired them to break the strike, to seize the mill from the men who had shut it down.
The first gunshot shattered the morning haze. The strikers fired back. A Pinkerton tumbled into the river, swallowed by the current. Another crumpled onto the deck, blood soaking into the wood. On shore, a steelworker clutched his stomach, staggering as a bullet tore through. By nightfall, the battle had claimed at least 10 lives: seven workers, three Pinkertons.
The nation was watching. Frick had become the face of the Homestead Strike. Headlines blazed across front pages:
“WAR IN PITTSBURGH!”
“BLOOD FLOWS AT HOMESTEAD!”
“FRICK CALLS IN TROOPS TO BREAK STRIKE!”
The workers had won the Battle of Homestead, for a moment. But by nightfall, Frick had summoned 8,500 National Guardsmen. The soldiers arrived in waves — rifles gleaming, boots pounding, bayonets fixed. And just like that, the mill was his again. Replacement workers took over, as the strikers were cast out. Eventually, many returned, this time under Frick’s terms: 12-hour shifts, and a 22 percent pay cut.
Carnegie, safe in Scotland, feigned ignorance, even though transatlantic communication was well established by then. He orchestrated from afar, keeping his hands clean.
Seventeen days later, Frick sat in his Downtown office when the door swung open. A man stepped in, pistol raised. The first shot tore through his neck, the bullet lodging near the base of his skull. Alexander Berkman, a 22-year-old anarchist from New York, fired again, striking Frick a second time. Blood seeped through his collar. Before Berkman could fire a third shot, he was tackled.
That night, at Clayton, the curtains remained drawn. Upstairs, doctors were treating Frick in his bedroom. In the bedroom next to his, Adelaide rocked their sickly newborn son, her body still frail from childbirth. A governess lingered near the doorway.
At The Frick Pittsburgh, the Gilded, Not Golden tour does not linger on luxury. Instead, it asks visitors to step into the contradictions of 1892.
In the kitchen, the coal-fired stove stands ready. Upstairs, the bed in Frick’s room is smaller than expected, its neatly tucked sheets undisturbed. The room softens in its details with flouncy pillows, a beautiful vanity, photographs of children lined up on the dresser.
“In 1892, Henry Frick and ‘Mr. Frick’ were two different people,” Collins says.
That summer of 1892 was a season of personal loss. Toward the end of July, as Frick recovered from the assassination attempt, their infant son, Henry Clay Frick Jr., died. Frick’s little daughter, Martha, had died the summer before, and it was the anniversary of her death. The wealthiest family in Pittsburgh had everything, except immunity from suffering.
But grief did not halt business. Frick returned to work, dictating letters and managing affairs, the bandages still soaked red under his clothes. Adelaide retreated into the house, her world shrinking to the nursery and the memory of two lost children.
In 1905, the Fricks left Pittsburgh. They moved to New York, to a mansion even grander than Clayton. Frick died in 1919, leaving behind $142 million. His oldest son was still alive, but Clayton and its art collection went to Helen, his unmarried daughter. Maybe because she shared his love for paintings. Maybe because he wanted her secure, wealthier than any man she would never marry.
The mills kept running. It took 44 years for steelworkers to reclaim their union. By then, it was 1936. The Great Depression had gutted the country, but steelworkers had their victory.
And Clayton? For decades, dust gathered on mahogany desks, leather-bound books, and silk curtains that had never seen soot. Then, in 1981, Helen Clay Frick came home. She walked the same halls she had run through as a child, touched the same books her father had once flipped through while signing steel contracts. The crystal chandeliers, the gilt-framed paintings, the heavy oak furniture — she preserved everything exactly as it was.
And when she died, Clayton became a museum. Today, 93 percent of the home remains original. In the nursery, the rocking horse remains, untouched.
“Helen Frick lived through the Homestead Strike,” says Collins, “and many decades later, maybe even watched Madonna on television.”
Outside, the air is lighter now. The mills are silent. The river runs clear. The sky is no longer black with smoke. But the legacy of 1892 remains.
Aakanksha Agarwal is a wine, travel, and lifestyle writer from India. Formerly a Bollywood stylist, she now resides in the U.S., embracing writing full time while juggling family life and indulging in her passions for cuisine, literature, and wanderlust.
