Frick Laboratory correspondence and publications

Childs Frick (1883-1965) was the son of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick and his wife Adelaide, and was a longtime American Museum trustee from 1920-1955. He was born in Pittsburgh, where he attended the Sterrett School and Shadyside Academy, and graduated from Princeton University in 1905. In 1916, Frick began a long association with the American Museum of Natural History Department of Paleontology, funding paleontology projects and expeditions featuring AMNH paleontologists Morris Skinner, Ted Galusha, and Beryl Taylor, mostly to the western parts of North America, and accumulating a collection of over 200,000 fossil mammals, which formed the basis of a series of monographic studies on mammal evolution. He wrote numerous scientific papers and the book "Horned Ruminants of North America." He served as Honorary Curator of Late Tertiary and Quaternary Mammals. He had a great interest in natural history and served as a Trustee on the board of many organizations, including the New York Zoological Society. He sponsored many scientific expeditions around the world and donated trophies to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and the AMNH. He was also the president of the Frick Collection, which is the corporate organization in charge of the art museum founded by his father. The collection was donated to the museum after Frick's death in 1965. The financial assets of the Childs Frick Corporation, which were donated to the Museum along with Frick's fossil collections in 1968, assisted in the construction of a new, 10-story collection and office building, which opened in 1973. Childs Frick married Frances Shoemaker Dixon in 1913, and they had four children: Adelaide (1915-1956), Frances (1916-1971), Martha (1917-1996), and Henry Clay II (1919-2007). The family lived at Clayton, an estate located in Roslyn, N.Y., which was a gift to Childs and his wife from Henry Clay Frick. Childs Frick died at Clayton in 1965.