The town was named for Amos Patten,[3][4] a resident of Bangor, Maine, who about 1828 purchased Township No.

[5][6] In 1829 Amos Patten hired Ira Fish and Eli Kellogg to survey the land.

A bill to appoint Trustees of the Patten Academy passed the Maine legislature and was signed by the governor in 1847.

[9] The Patten Academy opened its doors with 61 students in September 1848, and educated its residents for more than a century.

Two factors explain Patten's comparatively early development, and its position as the major town of the Penobscot panhandle and southwestern Aroostook in the nineteenth century.

First, it is the first town beyond the Mount Katahdin range, giving it access to the upper East Branch and lower Allagash River basins, which were leading lumbering areas.

Fish Stream is navigable by very small craft as far as Island Falls, approximately 10 miles (16 km) distance, for about six months of the year.

In the early days of lumbering, it was used to drive local cutting downstream, eventually to the mills at Old Town and Bangor.