Peterson Cat: 90 Years From a Single Bay Area Lot to Northern California and Oregon's Dealer

Howard Peterson founded Peterson Tractor & Equipment Company in 1936, acquiring the business from a company called Robinson Tractor and opening stores in San Francisco and Oakland. The timing put Peterson right in the middle of one of the defining infrastructure projects in American history: by 1939, Cat equipment sold and supported by Peterson had helped build both the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, work celebrated that year at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island.

Peterson's growth over the following decades came almost entirely through buying up smaller regional tractor dealers as their owners retired or sold, a pattern that built the company's current territory one county at a time. Ditz Bros Tractor (Santa Clara County) came in 1962, Pringle Tractor (Santa Cruz County) in 1959, Sierra Tractor (Shasta, Trinity, Tehama, and Butte counties) in 1958, Matthews Machinery (Humboldt County) in 1981, Zumwalt Tractor (Glenn County) in 1982, and Berglund Tractor (Mendocino, Lake, Sonoma, western Solano, and Napa counties) in 1988.

Crossing Into Oregon

The company's biggest territorial jump came in 2003, when Peterson expanded into southern Oregon by acquiring seven store locations from Pape Machinery, turning a Northern California dealer into a two-state operation. Leadership has passed through four generations along the way: founder Howard Peterson, his son-in-law Bill Doyle starting in 1977, grandson Duane Doyle starting in 1995, and great-grandson Duane Doyle Jr., who signed Caterpillar's Sales & Service Agreement as dealer principal in 2020.

Peterson's history also includes some genuinely unusual engineering work. The company built custom tracks and propulsion systems for Alaskan pipeline drill rigs in the 1970s, designed a remote-controlled bomb scraper for unexploded mine remediation in 2005, and even built the air-conditioned suit worn in the 2005 Fantastic Four movie. That kind of custom fabrication work is a reminder that the stronger regional CAT dealers, including Quinn Company further south in California, often run dedicated fabrication shops capable of building specialized attachments or custom machine configurations that a contractor can't source off a factory price sheet.

Timber, Wine Country, and Coastal Construction

Peterson's territory covers an unusually wide range of industries for a single dealer footprint. Forestry and logging contractors working Humboldt County's timberland lean on CAT track-type tractors and forestry excavators. Vineyard development contractors in Napa and Sonoma counties use dozers and excavators for terracing and drainage work. And southern Oregon's general and highway contractors depend on the dealer network Peterson picked up from Pape Machinery for everything from motor graders to backhoe loaders.

That spread of use cases means the rent-versus-buy decision looks different depending on which end of Peterson's territory you're in. A vineyard development contractor with a seasonal terracing job might rent for a single project. A logging contractor running equipment through most of the year is almost always better served by equipment financing, since financed ownership builds toward an asset instead of a recurring rental bill, and lets you claim Section 179 depreciation in the year the machine goes into service.

Whichever side of that line you fall on, it's worth comparing a dealer's own financing offer against an independent quote on our dozer and excavator equipment financing page before committing to a payment structure.

BFC Equipment Loans finances construction equipment for startups and established businesses nationwide, including Northern California and Oregon contractors buying through Peterson Cat 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.