Patterson, Frederick Douglass
1871-1932 · Contribution: 1913-1918
Engineered and built the Patterson-Greenfield automobile in 1915, making his family's company, C.R. Patterson & Sons, the first and to date only African American-owned and operated automobile manufacturer in U.S. history
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
Taking over his father Charles Richard Patterson's Greenfield, Ohio, carriage-manufacturing business in 1910, Patterson recognized the coming shift from horse-drawn carriages to “horseless carriages” and began offering automobile repair services in 1913, giving his workforce hands-on mechanical experience before the company introduced its own vehicle, the Patterson-Greenfield, in 1915; the custom-built car featured a 30-horsepower Continental four-cylinder engine, full-floating rear axle, cantilever springs, electric starting and lighting, and a split ventilating windshield, and was marketed as a practical luxury vehicle in several coupe and sedan configurations, including a “Red Devil” speedster. Unable to match the production scale and pricing of Detroit's emerging assembly-line manufacturers, Patterson ended automobile production in 1918 after building an estimated 30 to 150 cars, pivoting the company toward designing and building bus and truck bodies as the renamed Greenfield Bus Body Company, which remained successful through the 1920s. Patterson, who as a teenager became the first Black football player at Ohio State University after his father won a lawsuit securing his admission to the local high school, was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame alongside his father in 2021.
Life & background
Born in 1871 in Greenfield, Ohio, to Charles Richard Patterson, a formerly enslaved carriage maker, Frederick Patterson attended Ohio State University and became the school's first Black football player before joining his father's carriage business. He took over the company after his father's 1910 death, led it into automobile manufacturing from 1913 to 1918 and bus-body manufacturing through the 1920s, and remained active in Greenfield's business and civic life, including leadership roles in Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League, until his death in 1932.
Sources
- Automotive Hall of Fame; National Museum of African American History and Culture; The Washington Post
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