Frederick D. Patterson

Frederick Douglas Patterson was born on the second of May 1871 at Greenfield, Ohio, the son of Charles Richard Patterson — a former enslaved Virginia blacksmith who had escaped slavery in 1861 and settled at Greenfield to open a blacksmith shop — and Josephine Outz Utz Patterson, a freeborn Cincinnati domestic. He was the eldest of five children of the household.

He was placed at six at the Greenfield public schools and at fifteen at the Greenfield High School — the first Black graduate of the school in 1888 — and at the Ohio State University at Columbus from 1888 to 1891. He took the bachelor’s programme in horse-drawn carriage design and engineering at Ohio State and was at the time of attendance the only Black student in the engineering programme.

He was hired in 1892 at twenty-one at his father’s C. R. Patterson and Sons Company carriage works at Greenfield, the carriage company his father had opened in 1893 with the white carriage maker J. P. Lowe under the trade name Patterson and Lowe Carriages.

C. R. Patterson and Sons manufactured between 1893 and 1915 the principal high-end horse-drawn carriages of the American Midwest — including the Doctor’s Phaeton, the Side-Bar Surrey, the Stanhope Buggy, and the Brougham Coupé — at production volumes of over fifty units per year across the closing decade of the nineteenth century. The Patterson carriages were the only American luxury horse-drawn carriages of the period manufactured by a Black-owned firm.

He succeeded his father as president of the firm at C. R. Patterson’s death on the twenty-third of April 1910 — at the close of the American horse-drawn-carriage market — and undertook in 1912 the transition of the firm from carriage to automobile manufacture.

He completed across 1913 and 1914 the prototype Patterson-Greenfield touring automobile — a four-cylinder, thirty-horsepower, four-passenger touring car with electric headlights and a folding rumble seat — and commenced production at Greenfield on the twenty-third of September 1915. The Patterson-Greenfield was the first and only Black-owned American automobile manufacturer in the history of the industry.

Patterson manufactured approximately one hundred and fifty Patterson-Greenfield automobiles between 1915 and 1918 at the Greenfield works at a list price of eight hundred and fifty dollars — competing directly with the Ford Model T at four hundred and forty dollars. The Patterson firm could not match the Ford volume economics and discontinued automobile manufacture in 1918, returning to bus and commercial truck body manufacture across the closing fourteen years of its existence.

He died at Greenfield, Ohio on the eighth of October 1932 of complications of nephritis, at sixty-one.

He is honored here as the only Black American automobile manufacturer.