MacAllister Machinery: The Handshake That Made One Family Indiana's CAT Dealer for 80 Years

Most equipment dealerships that have lasted 80 years have a contract, a corporate parent, or at least a formal franchise agreement to point back to. MacAllister Machinery has a handshake. In 1945, as World War Two was ending and the country was about to enter the biggest construction boom it had ever seen, Caterpillar Tractor Company invited E. W. MacAllister to become its exclusive dealer across 68 Indiana counties. He accepted on a handshake, and the company his family built on that moment is still Indiana's CAT dealer today.

The timing could not have been better or worse, depending on how you look at it. The post-war building boom ended sixteen years of Depression-era scarcity and sent demand for residential and commercial construction machinery "off the charts," in the company's own words, but the new dealership's biggest problem at first was simply getting enough equipment. Early inventory was limited to D2, D4, D6, D7, and D8 tractors, 212, 112, and 12 motor graders, and DW10 and DW15 four-wheel tractor scrapers, a product line that looks almost unrecognizable next to the GPS-guided dozers and excavators MacAllister sells today.

Three Generations, One Franchise

MacAllister Machinery has stayed in family hands through three generations, growing its product lineup and territory the entire way. The company's Rental Division, launched in 1999, was a direct response to contractors who wanted CAT iron without committing to a purchase on every job, a pattern that's become standard across the dealer network but that MacAllister was relatively early to formalize. More recently, the dealer expanded outside Indiana entirely by purchasing Michigan CAT, taking on a second state's full dealership operation rather than simply opening a satellite branch.

That expansion pattern, a single-state family dealer eventually buying up a neighboring territory, shows up repeatedly in the CAT dealer network. We've documented a similar jump at Foley, Inc. in New Jersey, where a family dealership also pushed beyond its original state borders once its core territory matured. For a contractor evaluating a dealer, that kind of multi-state growth usually signals financial stability on the dealer's end, which matters when you're relying on that dealer for warranty support and parts availability years after the sale.

What Indiana Contractors Actually Buy Here

Walk into any MacAllister branch today and the lineup looks nothing like 1945's five dozer models. Site development contractors working Indianapolis's steady commercial build-out lean on CAT 320 and 323 excavators for utility and foundation work. Highway and heavy contractors building out the state's interstate corridors run CAT motor graders and larger dozers for grading and subgrade prep. Demolition contractors clearing old industrial sites in Gary, South Bend, and Fort Wayne depend on CAT hydraulic excavators fitted with shears and hammers. And agricultural-adjacent contractors doing drainage and tiling work across Indiana's farm country rely on CAT backhoe loaders and compact track loaders for the kind of versatile, trailer-friendly work that doesn't justify a dedicated excavator.

That range of use cases is exactly why there's no single right answer to the rent-versus-buy question. A demolition contractor bidding a handful of teardowns a year might be better off renting a shear-equipped excavator for each job. A site development contractor with steady Indianapolis commercial work booked a year or more out is almost always better served by equipment financing, since the monthly payment on a purchased 320 class excavator typically lands well under what the same machine would cost to rent for equivalent hours, while also building toward outright ownership instead of disappearing as a rental expense.

The depreciation side of the decision deserves equal weight. A purchased machine, financed properly, can qualify for Section 179 expensing in the year you put it into service, an advantage no rental agreement offers. If you're trying to run the numbers on a specific machine, our excavator equipment financing page breaks down how that comparison typically plays out, and it's worth running before you default to whatever financing a dealer's own captive finance arm offers at the counter.

BFC Equipment Loans finances construction equipment for startups and established businesses nationwide, including Indiana contractors buying through MacAllister Machinery or any other CAT dealer, with good credit or bad. Visit our home page to learn more, head straight to our equipment financing application if you're ready to move, browse our equipment for sale marketplace to buy or list equipment, or subscribe to our blog for more coverage like this.