If things had worked out a little differently, today’s highways might be full of Pattersons instead of Fords.
But Greenfield, Ohio, wasn't Detroit, and as innovative as Black businessman and engineer Frederick Douglass Patterson was, he lacked Henry Ford’s deep pockets.
Patterson, who took over the C.R. Patterson & Sons Company from his father, concluded that the horse-and-buggy era was ending. So he decided to get into the “horseless carriage” business. In 1915, two years after Ford started his automotive assembly lines in Detroit, the first Patterson-Greenfield car rolled out of the shop, a sleek two-door coupe.
The early days of the automobile were like the “Wild West,” with hundreds of small-scale manufacturers racing to grab a piece of the exploding industry, said Matt Anderson, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum. Many of them never produced a single automobile.
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“It would be challenging to check, but as far as we know, the Pattersons were the only Black automobile manufacturers,” Anderson said. The Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture also recognizes the Pattersons as the only Black carmakers.
Frederick Patterson’s grandfather, Charles, was a free Black man who left Virginia — where slave-catchers were known to kidnap African Americans regardless of their status — and arrived in Greenfield in the 1840s with his wife and four children.
“Greenfield was a well-known stop on the underground railroad, so he would have been able to feel safe here,” said Harold Schmidt, a member of the Greenfield Historical Society.
Greenfield, current population 4,335, is a manufacturing and agricultural town in a rural area about 50 miles south of Columbus. In the 1800s, Greenfield had a thriving blacksmith community and was a carriage-making center.
Charles Patterson quickly proved himself an able blacksmith, building a thriving business and starting a family. His son Charles Richard (C.R.) Patterson also followed an artisan’s path, working for a local carriage manufacturer. Over time, C.R. became a partner with a White man in the business. He eventually bought out his partner, and C.R. Patterson & Sons was born, thriving in Greenfield for decades.
Frederick Douglass Patterson, one of C.R.’s five children, was born in 1871. When Frederick was 15, C.R. sued to allow Frederick to attend all-White Greenfield High School. Areas surrounding Greenfield were less progressive: It would take the neighboring town of Hillsboro another 70 years to desegregate its schools.
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Frederick later attended Ohio State University, becoming class president and the first Black football player in the storied program’s history. He left before graduating to take a teaching job.
He subsequently returned to Greenfield to work in the family business, and he was elected to the all-White city council. He also served alongside Booker T. Washington as a vice president of the National Negro Business League.
As more cars filled the roads, the Pattersons found they could add to their thriving carriage business by repairing the automobile machines that were suddenly appearing around town. Then Frederick decided they should get into the horseless carriage business themselves.
“But they were late to the game,” said Christopher Nelson, 50, who grew up outside Greenfield and wrote his master’s thesis on the Pattersons before self-publishing the book “C.R. Patterson & Sons Company: Black Pioneers in the Vehicle Building Industry.”
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From 1915 to 1918, the Pattersons built more than 100 two-door coupes; each car took about two weeks to assemble. Meanwhile, Ford had perfected the assembly line and pumped out 300,000 cars in 1915 and a half million more in 1916. It took 90 minutes to make a Model T. With a few exceptions, like Studebaker, Patterson and others from the soon-to-be-bygone buggy era couldn’t compete.
Still, Frederick Patterson wasn’t finished. The arrival of World War I had many manufacturers looking at retooling trucks for military use, but he saw a different opportunity: Rural schools were consolidating, and students needed transportation.
Patterson had a robust “school carriage” clientele, public schools that ordered large horse-drawn carriages for transporting children to school. Now Patterson talked these customers into buying motorized school buses assembled at his factory. After 1918, the Pattersons exited the car business and began focusing solely on buses.
The Patterson auto works was the largest Black-owned manufacturing business in the country at the time, with more than 70 employees at its peak, according to Richard Patterson, Frederick’s 80-year-old grandson, who has documented the history of the family business. The factory was integrated, with Black and White employees working side by side, a rarity in that era.
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The Pattersons manufactured 500 buses a month, according to Richard Patterson, and produced as many as 7,000 between 1921 and 1931. At the company’s apex, one-third of the school buses in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania were Pattersons. Some Patterson buses were still on the roads as late as the 1950s.
“The fact that there was a Black family who produced buggies and moved into the 20th century to make automobiles, trucks and buses is something we are proud of,” Richard Patterson said. “And they produced transportation for almost 70 years. That is what I would like people to know, that there was a Black family that produced automobiles in this country.”
One of the enduring mysteries of the Patterson automobile is whether any still exist. Richard Patterson said his aunt always insisted one had survived and might be in the hands of a private collector in the Upper Midwest.
“She always said there was one,” he said. “I have tried to find it, with no luck.” Anderson of the Ford Museum noted that if an original Patterson exists, it would be very valuable.
With an estimated 1,000 Patterson buses on the road at one time, it’s likelier that a bus could be found, but none of those is known to exist either. In its final years, the Patterson company — which by then had rebranded itself the Greenfield Bus Body Company — delivered a load of buses to Haiti, and Richard Patterson speculated, “I think there might be a bus body in Haiti that is a chicken coop now.”
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In the end, the Great Depression, Frederick’s 1932 death, tighter regulations around school bus manufacturing and a labor strike at the factory helped shutter the Patterson company.
“The only reason the company went under was they could not secure loans after Frederick passed away,” Richard Patterson said. In a final bid to survive, the company left Greenfield for Gallipolis, 90 miles away, in 1938, but it closed the following year.
For decades, the Patterson legacy seemed to disappear. What was left of the Patterson works was razed 20 years ago to construct a bank. But since then, awareness has grown. A mural honoring the Pattersons’ contributions is being painted downtown, and a plaque marks the location where the auto works stood.
In 2021, C.R. Patterson and Frederick Douglass Patterson were inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Mich. The Pattersons will be featured in an exhibit there titled “Achievement,” which opens to the public on Feb. 25.
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Ron Coffey, 73, a former Greenfield city manager, said he would love to see a museum built in town to honor the Pattersons’ legacy. With no Patterson cars to display, he’s talked to engineers about building a replica.
“But I’ve been told that would cost $150,000,” Coffey said — a far cry from the $850 price tag of the original Patterson-Greenfield.
Kevin Williams is a freelance writer based in Ohio.
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