the plant. Of his operations from that time onward, the Pittsburgh Dispatch in a recent article on the Connellsville coke region, has the following to say:

Mr. Frick kept on building and buying ovens. When he couldn't buy he leased. The panic had knocked the courage out of speculation and left many a firm in a corner. While unwilling to sell, through hope of better times, they leased their works to Mr. Frick. Old men wagged their beards solemnly and pittied the young man; he had been lucky, and if he had any sense, or would listen to the advice of older men, he might live in comfort all the rest of his life. But he was making a fool of himself, and one of these days we would see what we would Well, the boom in coke came. The yearly profit on his leased works were more than the value of the works themselves. And those who had prophesied his ruin can see him any of these days still young, only thirty-six-the head of the Frick Coke company, which owns one-third of the ten thousand ovens in the region.

see.

Mr. Frick conducted the business in his own name until 1878, when he sold an interest to E. M. Ferguson of New York. The firm of H. C. Frick & Company was continued in that form, an addition to the partnership being made in the person of Mr. Walton Ferguson, also of New York, and brother to the gentleman named above. In 1882 the H. C. Frick Coke company was organized, and a large interest therein was sold to the Carnegie Brothers of Pittsburgh. It is, beyond any question, the largest coke company in the world, owning over thirty-five hundred ovens, all located in the Connellsville region; over ten thousand acres of coal, land and employing

four thousand men. It daily produces

about four hundred car loads, or sixtyfour thousand tons, of coke, which aggregates over two million tons per year. To do this, over three million tons of coal are used annually; and the coke

goes into every part of the country. The company owns eleven stores; and taken all in all it is one of the largest, busiest, most useful and most important industrial establishments to be found in America to-day.

The immense annual product mentioned above comes only in answer to the demand that is heard from the country over. The coke of this company is used by the manufacturers of iron, steel, brass, copper and silver wares, and by those using cupola furnaces for iron casting and smelting ores. No expense has been spared to produce the best article that can be made, and in order that only the purest water, free from sulphur and all other impurities, should be obtained, the company has erected, at a cost of one hundred thousand dollars, a system of water-works at the beginning of the line of its ovens, on the Youghiogheny river, from which all the ovens are supplied with water of the best possible nature for the result desired.

This is a grand advantage,

and is one of the reasons why the "Frick coke" is so much in demand by those who know the relative merits of

the various cokes.

This Connellsville region is a wonderful feeder to the industrial interests of the world; and in proof of the relation it bears thereto, I am tempted to quote as follows from a recent writer touching the yearly coke product of that district

alone :

Suppose we fork together the coke made during the last twelve months in the Connellsville region, the popular name for the black stripe of country about forty miles long by three miles wide, which lies northeast and southwest across Westmoreland

county and part of Fayette. Load it on cars and hitch them together in a continuous train. Start the train going at the rate of twelve miles an hour, which is about a fair average for freight trains, and run it day and night, without a moment's stop to cool hot boxes, or the slightest slacking up on stiff grades. Stand beside the track and watch the train roll by, day after day, hour after hour. Night after night listen to the clank, clank of the wheels over the jointed rails as every hour sees eighteen thousand tons of coke whirled past you. Toward morning of the ninth day the signal lamps on the last car will mark the end of the train, and you will begin to have a dreamy sort of notion of the magnitude of the coke industry that is blazing and smoking within an hour's ride of the city. The headlight of the train will be about twenty-four hundred miles away. I handle the product in this way, not that it is either novel or original, but because one can give a better notion of bulk this way than by any quantity of figures standing by themselves.

That Mr. Frick has been and is one of the chief moving forces in this great development, goes without the saying in

view of what has been recorded above. One reason of his marvelous success at

an age when most men are only beginning to see their way clear toward the substantial things of life, lies in the fact that when he decided to go into the coke business he dropped all else and gave to it all the power and energy there was in him. He was not content to fol

low in the old beaten paths but sought out new ones for himself. He was the first to see the possibilities before crushed

coke and to manufacture it, and now it is one of the special features of the great corporation of which he is the head. The favor with which his "crushed Connells

ville çoke"was received by manufacturers and the general public, encouraged him. to add improvement after improvement. to meet the growing demand, and now it is used by manufacturers, for household purposes, for carriage smithing and blacksmithing, for machinery forging, furnaces for brass melting, stoves and ranges in hotels and boardinghouses, on railroad cars, and in many places where its advantages over other kinds of fuel are many and apparent.

Mr. Frick has certainly accomplished enough in the decade past to excuse him from taking part in the other forms of financial and commercial activity of Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania. Those things are usually reserved for the leisure of later years, after a man has done his share of the active labor

of the world. Still, Mr. Frick is a director in the Pittsburgh National Bank of Commerce, and also a director in the Philadelphia Gas Company of Pittsburgh, which has done so much to develop the great system of natural gas. What this bright, active and brainy young man shall accomplish hereafter remains for the future to develop. he has already shown the possession of the highest qualities of financial generalship, and is universally recognized as one of the prominent and self-made men of Pittsburgh.

But

HENRY K. JAMES.

HERMAN KIEFER was born November 19, 1825, at Sulzburg, Grand Dukedom of Baden, Germany, and is the only son of Dr. Conrad and Frederica Schweyckert Kiefer. His academic and professional studies were thorough and liberal. He first attended the high school of Freiburg, beginning at his ninth year, and afterwards in turn those at Mannheim and Carlsruhe, completing his preparatory course at the age of eighteen years. He then began the study of medicine at the University of Freiburg, continued the following year at Heidelberg, and later, attended the medical institutions of Prague and Vienna. At various times he was under the instruction of such distinguished masters of medical science as Arnold, Henle, Oppholzer, Stromeyer, Pitha and Scanzoni, and in May, 1849, was graduated with the highest honors upon his examination before the state board of examiners at Carlsruhe. Such a degree received from such a source implies a prolonged and assiduous study, which America is but now beginning to appreciate, and, in a modified degree, to imitate in its requirements. The venerable institutions at which Dr. Kiefer spent fifteen years of his boyhood and young manhood, stand before the educated world as favorable examples of the vast and perfect machinery, by the agency of which Ger

many has so well earned the name of being a nation of scholars.

He

There is very slight probability that Dr. Kiefer would ever have become an American but for one agency-the same which has given to the United States much of the best blood and best brains of Germany-that of revolution. had scarcely received his doctorate when occurred the revolution of 1849. In common with thousands of his fellows among the educated youth of his country, he embraced the side of the people, with all the ardor and enthusiasm of his years, flinging his future carelessly aside, to espouse the cause of a down-trodden race, against the almost invincible power of organized authority. He joined the volunteer regiment of Emmendingen and was at once appointed its surgeon. With that regiment he was present at the battle of Phillipsburg, June 20, 1849, and at that of Upstadt, on the twenty-third of the same month. It was at the former engagement that Prince Carl, later FieldMarshal of Germany, was wounded and narrowly escaped capture by the regiment to which Dr. Kiefer was attached.

When the revolution was suppressed, Dr. Kiefer, in common with thousands of others, was compelled to flee the consequences of his patriotic service. He took refuge in the city of Strasburg,