Remembering Ola Lee Patterson, a cherished Tehachapi trailblazer

Provided by Jon Hammond.

Ola Patterson, 94, was the first African-American woman to live in Tehachapi. She and her husband Moses moved to Monolith in 1946 and later moved into Tehachapi to raise a family and buying a house here.

I would like to share the story of Ola Lee Patterson, a wonderfully good, kind and humble woman, who made her mark on Tehachapi history in her own graceful way.

Ola was a pioneer and trailblazer: she was the first African-American woman to live in Tehachapi. She and her husband, Moses, moved here with their daughters Maenell and Mozell in 1946, and in 1963 their youngest daughter, Laura, was the first African-American baby born at Tehachapi Hospital.

You might think that in a conservative county like Kern, the Pattersons would have to constantly struggle for acceptance, but in fact they were embraced by almost everyone in the community.

"People were wonderful to us here in Tehachapi," Ola once told me, "We've been treated very very nice." Much of that welcoming attitude was due to the personal character of the Pattersons themselves. Moses was a big, friendly, hard-working man who was well-liked and respected, and Ola was simply a gem of a human being. Sometimes bright, cheerful people are referred to as a "ray of sunshine," but Ola was more than one ray, she was an entire garden full of sunshine. Into her nineties she remained sharp, upbeat and fun to be around.

Ola passed away peacefully in her own bed in her well-kept Tehachapi home in 2018 at the age of 94.

Ola first came into the world in Ozan, Arkansas on February 4, 1924, the daughter of Edna Stewart and Autry McFadden. Her parents didn't stay together and she and her mother lived with her maternal grandparents, but she stayed in touch with her father.

Ola McFadden was the first-born of all her siblings – "I had six brothers and sisters on my Mom's side and four on my Dad's side," Ola said, "As the oldest, I helped raise them, of course. One of my younger brothers once told one of my girls that 'Your Mom is just like another Mom to me.' I took care of them while the adults were out working in the fields."

Growing up in the 1920s and 30s in rural Arkansas meant lots of hard work for Ola – as well as everyone else. She lived 20 miles from town, and people had to be self-sufficient. Farming was still done with horses. The family horse was intuitive enough to love young Ola. "I'd get up on a stump in the pasture where she was kept, and wherever she was, she'd come to me," Ola remembered. "That used to make my uncle mad because she'd run from him, but she'd always come to me. I was good to her and brought her little treats."

When she wasn't taking care of younger siblings, Ola had plenty of other work to do, including milking cows and feeding pigs. She was also sent to go catch fish for the family to eat. "People get all excited about being able to go fishing, but not me," Ola would laugh, "That's why I hate fishin' to this day, because I HAD to do it."

The men in Ola's family were sharecroppers, growing cotton, corn, peanuts and sugar cane on land they didn't own, and most of the income from their hard laborer went to the property owner. It was an abusive system that almost amounted to indentured servitude, and wasn't too far removed from slavery.

"Where we lived in Arkansas, white folks owned the farms, and black folks worked on the farms," Ola recalled. "Everything was separate. There were churches for the white folks and churches for the black folks. We had to go in the back door of restaurants, we couldn't use the front door."

Moses Patterson, whose first name most people pronounced as "Moze," worked on a farm and also in a sawmill. He was a strong, confident man with lots of different skills, and he was older than his future bride. "I was 18 years old, and Moses saw me and that was it," Ola once explained to me, with her eyes twinkling. "We went out for awhile, and he wanted to marry me and I wanted to get away from home, so we got married in 1941."

Provided by Jon Hammond.

Ola in 1956, when she was 32 years old.

Once they were married, Ola and Moses moved into a house on a farm where they both worked. Most of the sharecropper houses were more like cabins, without indoor plumbing or electricity – instead there were outside hand pumps for water and outhouses in place of bathrooms.

When Ola was pregnant with their first child, Maenell, the white farm boss wanted Ola to go out and work in the fields, hoeing peanuts. Moses had already told Ola that he didn't want her to have to work outside when she was pregnant, and so she refused. Moses found out and was angry, and went to see the boss. "Moze told him 'You don't tell my wife what to do,'" Ola said, "Moze said 'You tell your wife what to do if you want to, but you don't tell mine.'"

Knowing that the consequences for black/white confrontation could be harsh, the Pattersons decided that they needed to make a change. Moses heard that there was work available in California, so he headed West in the back of a truck with a bunch of other laborers in 1942. He picked peaches in Marysville, and also picked cotton by hand in California and Arizona. Moses came back and got Ola and Maenell and the family lived in Bakersfield. When Ola became pregnant again, she went home to Arkansas to stay with her mother and give birth to Mozell.

Moses was travelling through the Tehachapi area on the old road (Highway 466) that went right past the Monolith Portland Cement plant where he saw a sign that said "Men for Hire." He applied and was hired, so in 1946 he moved Ola and the two girls with him into a small house at Monolith.

Though it may seem like an unlikely mechanism to improve cultural relations, during its more than 100 years in operation, the cement plant at Monolith has in fact served to bring different ethnic groups together. Whites, Latinos, and smaller numbers of Native Americans and African Americans have worked together as equals at Monolith – as an oldtimer once told me, "Everybody is the same color when you're covered in cement dust – everyone is gray." In addition to a sizeable Latino population living at Monolith, there were also a couple of other black families in addition to the Pattersons. Though they had no car, the Pattersons could walk to the Monolith Store owned by Ed Tompkins and do their shopping and pick up their mail.

After a year or two of working at Monolith, Moses saved up enough money to buy the family's first car. That was another benefit of working at the cement plant: a good reliable paycheck, not dependent on the fluctuations of weather, like farming, ranching and construction are, meant that Monolith employees could successfully purchase big ticket items like vehicles and houses.

The Patterson family then moved to an old railroad house at Cameron Canyon, where they stayed until the Tehachapi earthquake of 1952. Concerned about being so isolated – they were among the handful of people living at Cameron Canyon – the Pattersons moved into the town of Tehachapi in 1952, renting a house on I Street from Reyes Verdugo and becoming the first African-American residents of Tehachapi.

Ola took work as a domestic, cleaning houses for some of the more well-to-do families in town. That too was something new in Tehachapi – in a blue collar town, having the money to pay someone else to clean for you was something of a novelty. Ola's pleasant personality and hard working ethic quickly charmed the people she worked for, and the whole family would look forward to her arrival.

Some of the food items that the Pattersons grew up eating in Arkansas weren't available in Tehachapi, but as a skilled farmer, Moses didn't let that stop him: he had a big garden and grew vegetables, including black-eyed peas and kept chickens for fresh eggs. Moses used to buy pigs from my family, and my Uncle Hank used marvel at his strength, saying "Moze Patterson can pick up a 300-pound pig and put it in his truck like it was nothin'." With his farming background, Moze used to do butchering around Tehachapi for people that raised their own livestock, and he was very well known and liked. And he doted on his daughters – "He had all three of 'em spoiled," Ola told me.

Ola has never drove – she was in a car accident when she was six years old that made her nervous about driving cars – but she did plenty of traveling. She used to go back to Arkansas every year to visit her family, and she'd get on the train at the Tehachapi Depot, just a couple of blocks from her home, and ride the train back to Texarkana. "People get such a thrill out of riding trains, but I don't find them so exciting," Ola told me with a smile, "I used to ride them all the time. When I went back home to Arkansas, I had to be on them two days and two nights each way."

With good friends and likeable neighbors, Ola was happy living in Tehachapi, but there was still one thing she was missing. "I was raised going to church every Sunday, and I was at a loss not being in a church," she told me. "One day a neighbor saw me hanging up laundry and asked if I was a Christian and I said that I was, and he invited me to come to church. The pastor himself, Pastor Martindale, invited me to come. Moses was a little skeptical, he told me 'Those white people don't want you coming to their church,' but I told him 'The preacher invited me so I'm going.' And they've been wonderful to me ever since."

Her church, Tehachapi's welcoming Christian Life Assembly, and the pastor at the time, Kevin Caudle, held a 90th birthday celebration for Ola, and when she got too frail to attend services, church members would come visit her at home. There was one difference between CLA and the churches of Ola's youth, though: "Back home people would get all dressed up in their best clothes to go to church, but out here I wore a hat and gloves and people looked at me like I was crazy," Ola chuckled.

Nearly 70 years after "breaking the color barrier" in the City of Tehachapi, Ola was a cherished member of the community. Moses passed away in 1981, but Ola had eight grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and six great-great grandchildren. All of her daughters were popular in school, and Mozell told me "I feel so blessed to have grown up in Tehachapi."

I wouldn't suggest that there was never any racism or prejudice here – we're up to 2024 and it still exists today, and I know there was some in the early days as well – but Moses and Ola Patterson and their daughters found fairness and equality in Tehachapi, a place where, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, they would "not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." And no one who's ever lived here had a better content to their character than the beautiful soul named Ola Lee Patterson.

Jon Hammond is a fourth generation Kern County resident who has photographed and written about the Tehachapi Mountains for 38 years. He lives on a farm his family started in 1921, and is a speaker of Nuwä, the Tehachapi Indian language. He can be reached at [email protected].