Childs Frick was the only surviving son of the coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) and Adelaide Howard Childs (1859-1931). The elder Frick is mostly remembered for his mansion on Fifth Avenue that he filled with art, and which became the Frick Collection after his death. This transformation as well as the creation of the Board of Trustees that governs the institution is the result of hard work by Adelaide Frick, Childs Frick and his sister, Helen Clay Frick.
Childs Frick was a very private person, and it is hard to get the sense of the man, but one thing that all the sources agree on, is that he was fascinated with animals from an early age.
Another poorly known fact about Frick’s private life is that he deeply loved his wife, Frances Shoemaker Dixon. When she died in in 1953, he was inconsolable and wore a black mourning band on his sleeve for the rest of his life. The archive holds a copy of a book of poetry that Frick privately printed in 1946 and that is dedicated to his wife.
Childs Frick graduated from Princeton in 1905 and subsequently spent some years collecting specimens of modern animals for U.S. museums. This pursuit led Frick to consider the evolution of mammals. However he found that the relevant paleontological data was inadequate, and decided to collect it himself.
Frick and Henry Fairfield Osborn, then the president of the American Museum of Natural History, moved in similar social circles and had a cordial relationship. In 1916, Frick asked Osborn if he could recommend an area on the Pacific Coast that was suitable for paleontological field work and that would be of interest to AMNH. Osborn suggested that Frick work with John C. Merriam, a professor of paleontology and historical geology at the University of California. Merriam, in turn selected an area in Riverside County where Frick could work. As the result of this work, Frick produced a publication on the paleontology and geology of the area which apparently impressed both Merriam and Osborn.
In September 1917, Osborn wrote to Frick offering him an appointment as assistant curator in vertebrate paleontology at AMNH. Frick reluctantly declined the position as the United States recently entered WWI and he joined the army as a first lieutenant in the Air Corps. It appears that Frick took his military duties seriously, as the archive contains his self-published plan for improvement in artillery guns.
After the war ended, Childs Frick reestablished his connection with AMNH and was unanimously appointed as an assistant in vertebrate paleontology by the executive committee of the Museum in June of 1919. When Childs Frick’s father died later that year, Childs gave up his post at the Museum for business reasons.
In 1920 Childs Frick was elected as a trustee of AMNH to take his father’s place, a post that he held until 1955, when he was elected honorary trustee. The role of trustee involved Childs Frick in the stewardship of the Museum during the challenging decades of the 1930’s and 40’s.
Meanwhile, despite giving up the position, Frick continued his association with the department as a research associate in vertebrate paleontology. A room in the Museum was set aside for Childs Frick to work on his research and Frick hired preparators to work on the fossils that were brought in from the field.
Noting that the Oligocene and Eocene eras had received the most attention of American field collectors, Frick decided to concentrate on Miocene and Pliocene fossils.
From the outset, Frick formulated long-range goals for making a collection of late Tertiary fossil mammals that would be as complete and as well-documented as possible.
In an article written for the magazine Curator in 1975, Theodore Galusha describes Frick’s motivations in the following way:
Frick was convinced that conflicting specimen identification and misleading stratigraphic allocations of fossil mammals in museums worldwide were causing confusion in paleontological literature. He believed that a scientist should not depend on synthesizing literature to provide basic information, but instead should place primary reliance on the information obtained from first-hand study of fossils. In order to overcome, or at least alleviate, some of this confusion, he decided that the large collection of fossil mammals also could be used as an independent control for research.(1)
Throughout the 1920’s what came to be known as Frick Laboratory existed informally within the walls of the Museum. There is no paper record, but an educated guess would point to a “gentlemen’s” agreement between Osborn and Childs Frick. Frick hired his own collectors to supply fossils from the field and his own preparators who extracted the fossils from the surrounding material when they made their way to the Museum.
In 1923 Childs Frick established an American Pliocene Fund at AMNH which he used to conduct his collecting and research. By 1932 he had set up 27 other funds at the Museum in order to finance various projects. Many of the AMNH collecting expeditions received support from these funds, including Barnum Brown’s South Asiatic and Samos expeditions and Roy Chapman Andrews’ Asiatic Zoological and Third Asiatic Expeditions. Over the decades, Frick supported numerous expeditions from the AMNH and other institutions, sometimes anonymously.
In 1932 Frick established the non-profit Childs Frick Corporation located in the State of Pennsylvania, its purpose being "the advancement of scientific knowledge through investigation, exploration, study, and research in the history of life and similar fields of natural science and the promotion of public interest therein by the dissemination of information relating thereto..." (2) The Corporation carried out the essential business activities, allowing Frick to focus on his research. Most of Frick’s staff was paid by the checks issued by the Corporation.
Frick lived with his family in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island, and he regularly drove into the city to work at AMNH. During one of these commutes, he barely escaped being involved in a serious accident. After that incident Frick’s wife encouraged him to build a laboratory on their estate (now the Nassau County Museum of Art), so that he would not have to commute to the city. In 1934 an additional laboratory space was established at Frick’s estate on Long Island and from that point on, there were two sets of preparators who worked on the specimens – one in the Museum and another one on Long Island. After the establishment of the Millstone Laboratory, as it was called, Frick visited the Museum less often, but still several times a month.
Throughout the 1930’s discussions were held in the attempt to formalize the relationship between the Museum and the Childs Frick Corporation, which resulted in an agreement signed in 1937. According to the documents held in the archive, the Childs Frick Corporation agreed to finance remodeling of some space in the Museum and construction of a temporary building to hold Frick’s fossil collection. It also agreed to assign important portions of its collections to the Museum “from time to time”.
In its turn, the Museum granted the right to the Childs Frick Corporation to occupy the remodeled space and the temporary building, or other space if the temporary building were to be removed. In the end, the temporary building never materialized, and the Frick Laboratory occupied space on 6th floor of the Southeast corner of the Museum as well as the attic space above adjacent to it.
This situation continued for the next 28 years until 1965. The Frick laboratory at times employed as many as 30 people, including such scientists as Morris Skinner, Theodore Galusha, Beryl Taylor, and Otto Geist. They, among many others, collected fossils in the field and contributed their publications to the discipline of paleontology.
Throughout the years Frick actively studied the fossils in his collection and conducted research on the questions that interested him. As the result of those studies he published a number of articles in AMNH periodicals and he produced a monograph on horned ruminants of North America in 1937. After that he focused on the history of carnivores and camels. The archive contains voluminous manuscripts and notes, extensively reworked by Frick as new evidence came from the field. In his work Frick attempted to produce complete taxonomic treatments of all available fossils of a family of mammals, as opposed to publishing individual descriptions of specimens.
![Childs Frick, Horned Ruminants of North America, New York: The American Museum of Natural History, [1937], VPA 110 Frick Laboratory Publications](/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/amnh/images/our-research/library/library-news/horned-ruminants-cover/6057994-1-eng-US/horned-ruminants-cover_full_610.jpg)
Over the years, Frick recognized the need for more and better stratigraphic data and required his field men to prepare geologic and stratigraphic reports on selected key areas of late Tertiary deposits.
Childs Frick died on May 8, 1965. According to his wishes, the collection of 250,000 fossil specimens together with all the records and documentation was donated to the Museum. In addition, an agreement was reached with H. Clay Frick II (Childs Frick’s son) for the Childs Frick estate to finance a construction of a building within the AMNH campus, to hold the collection of the fossils, and to provide office, laboratory, and study space. The estate transferred all the money from the Childs Frick Corporation to the Museum as an endowment to make it possible for further work to continue with the fossil collection.
The Frick Building (Building 3A) was built as the result of that agreement. Since the building site did not have direct access from outside, special cranes had to be positioned next to existing Museum buildings, and the construction materials had to be lifted over the existing building.
The importance of Childs Frick’s work for the fossil collection in the AMNH cannot be overstated. It is estimated that the fossils collected by his employees constitute half of all the mammal collection in the Department.
In addition to the mammal fossil collection and the endowment, his legacy includes his innumerable (literally so, since it is impossible to come up with even an approximate dollar figure without doing further research) contributions to the fields of conservation, geology, biology, medicine, comparative anatomy, natural science education, anthropology, and herpetology.
(1) Tedford Galusha, Childs Frick and the Frick Collection of Fossil Mammals, Curator, 18/1, 1975, pp. 10-11
(2) Quoted from a letter to F. Trubee Davison, President of AMNH, 1936, VPA 111, Frick Laboratory Administrative and Personnel Records, Series 3
Thomas D. Nicholson, Director, Bobb Schaeffer, Theodore Galusha, Malcolm C. McKenna, Morris F. Skinner, Beryl E. Taylor, Richard H. Tedford, The Fossil Mammal Collections of The American Museum of Natural History, Curator, 18/1, 1975
Harold E. Anthony, Childs Frick, no date, unpublished presentation, VPA 117, Malcolm C. McKenna papers