Between 1893 and 1939, there existed an auto manufacturing company that was owned and operated by Black Americans! Imagine today’s highways being full of…. Pattersons instead of Fords!
The C.R. Patterson & Sons Company was a carriage building firm, and the first, and probably the ONLY, African American-owned automobile manufacturer. The company was founded by Charles Richard (C.R) Patterson, who was born into slavery in April 1833 on a plantation in Virginia. His parents were Nancy and Charles Patterson. Patterson escaped from slavery in 1861, heading west and settling in Greenfield, Ohio around 1862 (Greenfield was a well known stop on the underground railroad at that time).
At some point after his arrival in Ohio, C.R Patterson went to work as a blacksmith for the horse carriage-building business, Dines and Simpson. In 1865 he married Josephine Utz, and had five children from 1866 to 1879. In 1873, Patterson went into partnership with J.P. Lowe, a white man who was a Greenfield-based carriage manufacturer. Over the next twenty years, Patterson and Lowe developed a highly successful carriage-building business. In 1893, he bought out his partner, and C.R. Patterson & Sons was born, thriving in Greenfield for decades. The company built 28 types of horse-drawn vehicles and employed approximately 10-15 individuals. While the company managed to successfully market its horse-powered carriages and buggies, the dawn of the automobile was rapidly approaching.
C.R Patterson died in 1910, leaving the successful carriage business to his son Frederick who in turn initiated the conversion of the company from a horse carriage business into an automobile manufacturer. The first Patterson-Greenfield car debuted on September 23, 1915 and was sold for $850 (or approx..$22,000 adjusted for inflation in 2021). A two door coupe with a four-cylinder Continental engine, the car was comparable to the contemporary Ford Model T. The Patterson-Greenfield car may, in fact, have been more sophisticated than Ford’s car, but C.R. Patterson & Sons never matched Ford’s manufacturing capability. It is estimated they built somewhere between 30 and 150 vehicles, and none are known to have survived to present day. 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.
In 1918, C.R. Patterson & Sons halted their auto production and concentrated once again on the repair side of the business. By the 1920s, the company soon switched to production of truck, bus, and other utility vehicle bodies which were installed atop chassis made by major auto manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors. Its school bus bodies in particular became popular as Midwestern school districts began to convert from horse-drawn to internal-combustion-fired transportation by 1920. Most of the bus bodies were purchased by school boards in Southern Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky, as well as the Ohio Transit Company and used in Cincinnati and Cleveland. In 1920, the company reorganized as the Greenfield Bus Body Company. In the 1920s, 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.
But the Great Depression sent the company into a downward spiral. Frederick Patterson died in 1932, and his son Postell Patterson (1906–1981) took over the business. The company began to disintegrate in the late 1930s, and around 1938, the company moved to Gallipolis, Ohio, changing its name again to the Gallia Body Company in an attempt to restart its prior success. The attempt failed and the company permanently closed its doors in 1939. Like many other small auto manufacturers, the company was unable to compete with Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, and other large automobile manufacturers.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.R._Patterson_and_Sons
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/02/18/cr-patterson-black-automaker/
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