Stowers Machinery: Three Brothers Who Took Over a CAT Franchise in East Tennessee in 1960

Stowers Machinery Corporation didn't start the Caterpillar franchise for East Tennessee. It inherited it. In 1960, three brothers, Dick, Bud, and Harry Stowers, took over the CAT dealership from the existing R.L. Harris dealership, a transition that's easy to overlook but actually says a lot about how the CAT dealer network has evolved: plenty of today's long-running family dealers didn't start their franchise from scratch, they took the reins from a previous dealer and built on what was already there.

The franchise the Stowers brothers took over covers all 38 counties of East Tennessee, from Knoxville out to the Tri-Cities and down through Chattanooga, a region that runs from dense urban redevelopment in Knoxville and Chattanooga to mountainous highway and infrastructure work in the more rural counties toward the North Carolina and Virginia borders. That geographic range means Stowers' equipment mix has to cover a lot more ground, literally, than a dealer serving a single metro area.

Fifty Years Marked in a Down Economy

Stowers Machinery marked its 50th year as East Tennessee's Caterpillar dealer in December 2010, a milestone Caterpillar's own Americas Distribution Services Division came to Knoxville to recognize in person, with Jim Parker praising Wes Stowers, the company's chairman, for the dealership's sustained commitment to the region. The timing was notable: 2010 was deep in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, one of the harder stretches for construction equipment dealers nationwide, and Stowers chose to mark the anniversary rather than quietly let it pass.

The dealership now runs seven locations, including two in Knoxville plus stores in Chattanooga, the Tri-Cities area, and Crossville, totaling 320,000 square feet of facilities. Stowers employs 328 people with an average retention of over 11 years, more than double the national average for the industry, and the company has made a point of hiring military veterans, who currently make up roughly a quarter of its workforce. That kind of staff retention tends to show up directly in service quality, since a technician who has spent a decade with one dealer knows the local fleet and the region's common failure points far better than a revolving cast of new hires would.

What That Means for Financing in East Tennessee

East Tennessee's mix of urban redevelopment in Knoxville and Chattanooga alongside mountainous highway work in the surrounding counties means contractors here run a genuinely wide range of CAT equipment: excavators and compact track loaders for infill construction sites downtown, dozers and motor graders for grading and subgrade work on rural highway projects, and backhoe loaders for the utility and drainage work that shows up on almost every job type in between.

For a contractor with steady, year-round work across that range, equipment financing is almost always the stronger play over renting, since a structured loan or lease payment builds toward ownership and qualifies for Section 179 depreciation in the year the machine is placed in service, something a rental agreement simply doesn't offer. Renting still makes sense for a short highway subcontract with a hard end date, but for ongoing grading, utility, or site work, the math tends to favor financing once you look past 4 to 6 months of continuous use.

Whichever route fits your workload, it's worth comparing a dealer's own financing against an independent quote on our excavator equipment financing page, especially if your business doesn't fit the credit profile a dealer promotion assumes.

BFC Equipment Loans finances construction equipment for startups and established businesses nationwide, including East Tennessee contractors buying through Stowers 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.