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.”
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.
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.”