Frederick D. Patterson

Frederick Douglass Patterson was born on September 17, 1871, in Greenfield, Ohio, the son of Charles Richard Patterson — a formerly enslaved blacksmith who had made his way north from Virginia around the eve of the American Civil War and settled at Greenfield. Named for the great abolitionist, Frederick came of age in a family that had already turned skilled hands and stubborn dignity into independence, and he was raised to inherit both the craft and the name.

He graduated from Greenfield High School in 1888 and went on to Ohio State University, where in 1891 he became one of the first African Americans to play on the Ohio State football team. Though he left before completing his degree, he returned home to the family enterprise his father had built: C. R. Patterson and Sons, the carriage-making firm established in 1893, which grew into one of the most respected buggy and carriage works in the region.

Upon his father's death, Frederick took the helm and steered the company into the automobile age. In 1915 the firm produced the Patterson-Greenfield automobile, powered by a four-cylinder Continental engine and offered as the equal of Henry Ford's Model T. It stands as the first and only automobile designed and manufactured by a Black-owned company in American history — some three dozen or more built before the crushing scale of Detroit's assembly lines forced the family to turn instead to building bus and truck bodies.

Frederick Douglass Patterson died on January 18, 1932, in the Greenfield he never left. He carried a formerly enslaved man's workshop into the machine age and set a mark no other has matched. May his name, and the craft he honored, be remembered.