Tractors

 

Very Hungry Caterpillars And Local History

Butterfly Garden - Coyote Hills

San Leandro Plant Shuts After 99 Years : First Home of Caterpillar Tractor Closes Doors

MAY 6, 198512 AM

ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN LEANDRO, Calif. —  Workers at the original home of Caterpillar Tractor Co., closing down after 99 years as part of a $225-million consolidation plan by the financially ailing company, once said proudly that they had “yellow paint in their veins.”

Production workers stopped making fuel injection systems two weeks ago, and finished their last day on the job Friday. Now, only a cleanup crew remains to dismantle an important part of the city’s history.

“It’ll be all closed down and buttoned up sometime in August,” said Kent Ryden, the plant’s labor relations manager.

Only 50 workers are left from a 1979 work force of 2,000. Only crates remain at a once-bustling plant opened by a young sharpshooter named Daniel Best.

The Caterpillar tradition began with Best, who rode a wagon train as an armed guard in the mid-1800s from his native Iowa to Oregon, where he began his industrial career by inventing a machine to clean grain in the field. He later invented a steam-powered wheel-type tractor that became the key to his future success.

Best went to San Leandro from Oregon in 1886 and bought the San Leandro Plow Works, renaming it the Daniel Best Agricultural Works.

At the same time, a company run by Benjamin Holt and his brothers in San Francisco and Stockton had begun building saw wagons, carts, wheels and other farm tools. In the late 1880s, they began manufacturing agricultural equipment.

The Holt company developed the first crawler-type tractor in 1904 and gave it the trademark “Caterpillar” to describe its wheels.

Meanwhile, Best had built his first gas traction engine used in a steam tractor. In 1908, he sold the Holts a patent for the Best steam tractor along with his industrial buildings, and retired.