Carney Jr. said, "After my grandfather, Charles Carter, passed away in 1964, the business transferred to my mother, Jane Carter, and father, Tom. I started in 1970, and my sister, Mary Pat Turner, and her husband Steve started in 1978. They retired in 2010". As of 2023, Tom Carney Jr., his daughter, and his son-in-law maintain operations. Caterpillar Inc. The Holt Manufacturing Company in Stockton, California had successfully built crawler-type tractors and in 1909 began looking for manufacturing facilities closer to the vast agricultural markets in the Midwest farm belt. Company President Benjamin Holt dispatched his nephew, Pliny E. Holt in March 1909 to find another plant. He met Murray Baker, an implement dealer, who knew of a factory already equipped to manufacture farm implements and steam traction engines that had belonged to the bankrupt Colean Manufacturing Co. of East Peoria. Pliny inspected the Colean factory and learned Colean had spent at least $450,000 on the relatively new building and machinery. Holt bought the assets on October 25, 1909 for the $50,000 note held by a trust company. and began operations on February 15, 1910 with 12 employees. The "Holt Caterpillar Company" was incorporated in both Illinois and California on January 12, 1910. East Peoria became Holt Manufacturing Company's eastern manufacturing plant, competing with the nearby Avery Tractor Company. Holt was credited with producing the first practical continuous tracks for use with tractors and he registered "Caterpillar" as a trademark in 1911.The Peoria facility proved so profitable that only two years later the Peoria facility employed 625 people and was exporting tractors to Argentina, Canada, and Mexico. In April and May 1925, after a period of financial difficulty, the financially stronger C. L. Best merged with the market leader Holt Caterpillar to form the Caterpillar Tractor Co. Clarence Leo Best assumed the title of CEO, and remained in that role until October 1951. The new company was headquartered in San Leandro until 1930, when under the terms of the merger it was moved to Peoria. The Caterpillar company consolidated its product lines and went on to supply the Allied armies with artillery tractors during World War I, the first use of crawling type tractors for military purposes. When World War I broke out, with the problem of trench warfare and the difficulty of transporting supplies to the front, the pulling power of crawling-type tractors drew the attention of the military.