Correspondence, Receipts and Ledger Books

This series contains voluminous records of correspondence between the Frick Company and its clients regarding orders, as well as bills and receipts from its numerous suppliers of raw materials and components. The bulk of the material documents business transactions, both on printed letterhead and plain paper, between 1859 and 1873, with additional copy books and ledgers documenting the period between 1892-1902. Subseries 2.1 largely contains receipts with some business correspondence, arranged alphabetically by company in order to highlight those suppliers with whom Frick interacted the most in the first few decades of its existence. Subseries 2.2 contains much of the same type of material, arranged by year, highlighting more of the individual clients' communication with Frick (mostly farmers and business owners placing and refining orders) as well as receipts from the suppliers with whom Frick had less frequent interaction than those in Subseries 2.1. Subseries 2.3 contains bound volumes of outgoing correspondence from Frick, as well as incoming bills and receipts from other companies, arranged alphabetically by supply. Subseries 2.4 contains a mix of business and personal letters from family members and acquaintances of George Frick who were frequent correspondents, including correspondence from his uncle John D. Frick, his business acquaintance Ezra Landis, who was in partnership with Jacob Frick, and his business partner C.F. Bowman, who died of typhoid in 1872. This subseries also contains many letters from young men seeking employment and/or apprenticeship with Frick, as well as a sequence of letters and legal documents from Alexander Reeder regarding his daughter Wilhemina, who became pregnant while living with George Frick's family in 1867, possibly as a ward or servant. Later correspondence in this series (1898-1901) refers to a three-year-long process to retrieve the body of Frick employee Abram Geist from the Dominican Republic after he died of fever there while supervising the installation of a Frick and Company ice plant, as well as correspondence related to patent infrigement issues from 1917 and 1924.