Frederick Douglas Patterson (1871 – 1932) was an American entrepreneur, known for running the family business, C.R. Patterson and Sons, and he is the creator of the Patterson-Greenfield automobile of 1915. While in college at Ohio State University, he was the first African American to play on its football team. He returned to Greenfield, Ohio to join his father in his carriage business, which became C.R. Patterson and Sons. The younger man saw opportunity in the new horseless carriages, and converted the company in the early 1900s to manufacture automobiles, making 150 of them. Later he shifted to making buses and trucks, and renamed his company as Greenfield Bus Body Company. Early life and education Named after the noted abolitionist, Frederick Douglas Patterson was born in 1871, one of five children of Josephine Utz (aka Outz or Qutz) and Charles Richard Patterson. His siblings were Mary, Catherine "Kate", Dollie, and his younger brother Samuel C. Their father was a former slave who had left to Greenfield, Ohio from Virginia shortly before the American Civil War. After getting established as a blacksmith in town, Charles married Josephine Utz, a young local mulatto woman of German descent. In 1873, Charles and J.P. Lowe, a white carriage maker, established a successful carriage manufacturing business called J.P. Lowe & Company. The Pattersons cared deeply about the education of their two sons, Frederick and Samuel. Frederick graduated from the old Greenfield High School in 1888 and went on to Ohio State University. While at the university, he played on the football team in his junior year on the 1891 Ohio State Buckeyes football team, the first African American to do so. He withdrew from college in his senior year before graduating, taking a job as a high school history teacher in Louisville, Kentucky. It was a different career than his father's business, where his brother Samuel was already working. Family business Frederick Douglas Patterson took over the business after his father died in 1910. Seeing the rise of "horseless carriages", Patterson started development of the first Patterson-Greenfield car, completed in 1915. His two styles competed with Henry Ford's model T and sold for $685. He was the first African American to own and operate a car manufacturing company. After producing somewhere between 30 to 150 vehicles and give money to the poor, he having difficulty getting financing for expansion, Patterson decided to change his business