Historical Snippets

TRACTORS AND DOZERS

On a hill overlooking south Hayward just inside Garin Regional Park are remnants of a rusting old tractor, it’s iconic yellow paint long gone, sitting in dry weeds among a collection of crumbling antique farm implements. It’s highly likely that our dad assembled or machined parts for it’s newly developed diesel engine early in his forty seven year career at Caterpillar’s San Leandro factory.

Caterpillar Tractor Company origins date back to the late 19 th century when Benjamin Holt’s Stockton Wheel Works joined with Daniel Best’s San Leandro Plow Works. The combined company built steam-driven wheeled tractors and harvesters to replace the cumbersome forty horse teams used to draw harvesting equipment on California’s huge Central Valley farms. Around 1906 Best and Holt developed the now familiar “crawler” tractor that ran on continuous metal-belted tracks instead of on wheels.The new tractor’s dubbed “Caterpillars” were immediately successful as all- terrain, all weather bulldozers and were responsible in a significant way for the expansion of farming, creating the national highway systems and for countless construction projects. The familiar domestic tracked workhorse with direct roots to Stockton and San Leandro was also the forerunner of highly efficient armed armored machines that forever changed the face of warfare. Although Holt and Best didn’t build tanks, they did make thousands of tractor’s for the military used for hauling artillery ammunition, supplies, and for construction projects during the World Wars.

Caterpillar Tractor Company, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, flourishes today as a multi-billion dollar multi-national corporation headquartered in Irving, Texas. The San Leandro plant, company headquarters until 1930, closed in 1981 after 99 years of operation and a memorial archway from the original factory stands on the factory site on Davis Street, a highway and high school in Stockton commemorate Benjamin Holt’s legacy, and on a hillside in Hayward a rusty old “Cat” slowly returns to the earth.

-Bill 12/25