The name Frederick Douglas Patterson is not one that springs to mind when contemplating the history of automobiles. Maybe it should, though; perhaps not for its impact on automobile culture and American society at the time—after all, Patterson’s company made cars for only three years or so in the mid-1910s—but for the fact that Patterson was Black. Christopher Nelson’s absorbing non-fiction work, THE C. R. PATTERSON AND SONS COMPANY, charts the progress C. R. Patterson and Sons made as it went from starting as a carriage-building company in the 1860s to becoming a fledgling car company and beyond.

Patterson’s father, Charles Richard, had been born in 1833 as a free man in Virginia. Nelson skillfully leverages the often-scanty historical evidence to tell the family’s story. In the 1840s—the date is not certain—Charles Richard moved to Ohio in search of better economic opportunities. In 1865, he founded his company, and set to work manufacturing carriages. Barely five years later, he had become the wealthiest Black citizen in Greenfield, the town where he and his family set down their roots. By the time of Charles Richard’s death in 1910, the company had already been in the hands of his son, Frederick (a graduate of Ohio State University), for many years. It was Frederick who made the bold decision to manufacture cars. Although the venture proved unsuccessful in the end, it remains an important and often overlooked part of African American history.

The book was inspired by Nelson’s M.A. thesis, and it does sometimes have the clinical feel of a dissertation. There is a predisposition towards discussion of minutiae in the main text, rather than in the footnotes, and statistics showing the family’s substantial investment in mortgages around the turn of the century are (mostly) relegated to appendices for the curious reader. However, the style is easygoing and readable, and the story is compelling. Elsewhere, there is a wealth of archival material, including black and white photographs, plans, and portraits of family members. Nelson’s achievement is that he places the story of the Pattersons within the wider context of African American entrepreneurship in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His meticulous documentation of the obstacles—including social and economic isolation, the difficulties involved in securing proper credit, and racial discrimination (manifesting in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Ohio’s more populous cities during the 1920s)—is a testimony to the Pattersons’ extraordinary courage, as well as the qualities of excellence and persistence they exuded.

Readable and compelling, Christopher Nelson’s THE C. R. PATTERSON AND SONS COMPANY tells the true story of a Black entrepreneur who should be far better known to students of African American history and the general reader alike.

~Craig Jones for IndieReader