Lost Black Legacy: How C.R. Patterson & Sons Pioneered Automotive History
C.R. Patterson & Sons played a major role in Black automotive history. Charles Richard Patterson was born into slavery in Virginia in 1833 and later settled in Greenfield, Ohio, a town with abolitionist ties and Underground Railroad history. He worked as a blacksmith, became a foreman, and in 1873 partnered with J.P. Lowe to start […] The post Lost Black Legacy: How C.R. Patterson & Sons Pioneered Automotive History first appeared on Upscale Magazine.
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C.R. Patterson & Sons played a major role in Black automotive history. Charles Richard Patterson was born into slavery in Virginia in 1833 and later settled in Greenfield, Ohio, a town with abolitionist ties and Underground Railroad history. He worked as a blacksmith, became a foreman, and in 1873 partnered with J.P. Lowe to start a carriage business. Two decades later, he bought Lowe out and renamed it C.R. Patterson & Sons.
Patterson succeeded in an era when racism and segregation blocked many Black inventors from professional networks, financing, and patent support. Even so, he secured three U.S. patents, including an 1887 thill-coupling device that worked like a shock absorber between a horse harness and carriage axle.
The company expanded to 28 carriage models and sold across the South and Midwest. It also marketed itself as Black-owned in the Journal of the National Medical Association to reach Black physicians. One of Patterson’s most creative designs, a storm buggy with interior sliding doors, anticipated modern van features by decades.
Courtesy of the Historical Society of Greenfield, Ohio, www.greenfieldhistoricalsociety.org.
After Patterson died in 1910, his son Frederick took over. Frederick, who had been the first Black football player at Ohio State and a leader in Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League, shifted the company toward automobiles. In 1915, the Patterson-Greenfield car debuted, but it could not compete with Ford’s mass production. Built by hand and limited by a lack of capital, the company produced an estimated 30 cars before ending automobile production in 1918.
The firm later turned to school bus manufacturing, and at its peak supplied about one-third of the school buses in several Midwest states. The company closed in 1939. In later recognition, both C.R. and Frederick Patterson were inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, and C.R. Patterson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2025.
The post Lost Black Legacy: How C.R. Patterson & Sons Pioneered Automotive History first appeared on Upscale Magazine.
