Does anyone out there know if Caterpillar made a horse drawn, bottom dump, gravel wagon about 75 or 80 years ago. My Uncle owes one that he has restored but he couldn't find a manufacturers name. He believes it is either a Caterpillar or a Hough. I have pictures of it so if you think Caterpillar made a wagon like this, contact me and I will email you the pictures to help you identify it. Thanks for any assistance you may provide.

I looked in my SNID book from Cat at the early equip. they made but I didn,t see one listed there but if it had another serial number besides in the early equip. pages there could have been one made by them but I don,t know.

I've seen a couple of those wagons and they were made by the
manufacturers of regular wagons. Horse drawn equipment was on its way out thanks to Cat. I doubt they would have made an item like that in the Midwest plant. Maybe when they were in the combine business, that plant may have made them?

DRU. that,s where I meant I looked in the real early equip. like the combines etc. and I didn,t see any wagon listed.They could have been made as you say by a wagon Co. back then.

Most wagons were made by Studebaker or Baine and others. Caterpillar's history does not mention wagons. In WWII Cat made aircraft parts and artillery shells but there is no mention of wagons. Horse drawn dump wagons were used into the 1920's but were rapidly replaced by trucks. People who broke teams to harness loved to use the dump wagons because they were much harder to tip over if the team turned to tightly as the front axle was set up like a fifth wheel. Filling dump wagons with a steam shovel must have been exciting for the teamsters at times.

Doubt if Cat ever made horse drawn wagons but Stockton Wheel Company (Holt Bros) certainly did as it was part of their business wherther or not they were bottom dump I don't know later they made side dump wagons for use with steam traction engines,there were a lot of mule pulled wagons been loaded by an elevating grader in the old film clips I posted in the past,found a picture of a side dump,lifted it from an old film clip.
AJ

"snowpro" wrote:

Does anyone out there know if Caterpillar made a horse drawn, bottom dump, gravel wagon about 75 or 80 years ago. My Uncle owes one that he has restored but he couldn't find a manufacturers name. He believes it is either a Caterpillar or a Hough. I have pictures of it so if you think Caterpillar made a wagon like this, contact me and I will email you the pictures to help you identify it. Thanks for any assistance you may provide.

I don’t think you’ll find that Caterpillar every built a dump wagon. But they were more that one company that did, one which was the Watson Products Corporation they build the Watson Bottom Dump Wagon.

If you have a picture, one may narrow it down a little more as to the make.
Kelly

Like AJ said, the Holts were making wagons long before they started making tractors. Holt got into the crawler business after the state of California started selling off it's "swamp and overflow" lands, which were excluded in the Spanish land grants.

At that time there was a large industrial manufacturing base in Stockton that was making everything from Barges with dredges and pumps to horse powered earthmoving equipment. This was at a time when the state was in transition from Mining into AG and logging. Stockton wheel was still a small business when the big manufactures in town were building dredges.

Prior to the realestate bust in the early 1900's there was big money in transforming the land and subdividing the 20,000 acre land grants into smaller parcles sold to people on the Eastcoast and Europe.

Stockton Wheel is still in existence, had them make some wheels for my BeGe scraper last year. They have a large collection of old Cat toys, tractors, graders and the like, made by Tonka and other manufactures. They are on Fremont st. in Stockton and in phone directory. Nice folks.
Frank

Yep Stockton Wheel is on what was banner island, almost next to the new Stockton arena & minor league baseball park. They always have a nice display of their toy cars and classic cars at the Goodguys car show in Plesanton.