Cletrac - A Short History

Today we'll be taking a look at the history of Cletrac, formally the Cleveland Tractor Company.

Cletrac's history begins with brothers Rollin and Clarence H. White, who founded the Cleveland Motor Plow Company in Cleveland, Ohio in 1916.

However, the sequence of events that led up to that founding start earlier, about 1898. Circa 1898 Rollin's father, Thomas H. White, founder of White Sewing Machines, purchased a Locomobile steam car. Thomas soon found this car to be unreliable, particularly the boiler, so Rollin set out to design an improved version. Rollin would succeed in this endeavor in 1900, and would found the White Motor Company, which would produce the White Steamer, a steam car that had several significant advancements and improvements over the other steamers on the market.

White (the company) would go on be involved in a vast array of industries, and to offer a large variety of products (White is probably best known for White Trucks).

However, today we're focusing on the agriculture and industrial equipment side.

We'll pick up on the Cleveland Motor Plow Company's history - Rollin had started developing a crawler tractor on a family owned pineapple plantation in Hawaii in 1914, and would complete the tractor in 1916, which kickstarted the CMP Co.

They would offer wheeled and crawler tractors until 1918, when they stopped production of wheeled models and changed the company name to Cletrac.

The crawlers would prove to be a very successful product for Cletrac, selling in huge numbers both in the U.S. and abroad, to both civilian and military customers.

They would have a particularly good customer in the form of the U.S. Military during World War 2, and endeavored to develop a special high speed crawler specifically for their use.

However, this would contribute to their undoing - due to high development costs and low profits, Cletrac would sell out to Oliver Farm Equipment in 1944. Until this time Cletrac was still in the portfolio of the Whites.

Oliver would continue offering Cletrac models under the Oliver-Cletrac name, and would move operations and construction to Charles City, Iowa.

In an interesting circular twist, in 1962 White Motor Corporation bought Oliver, which brough Cletrac back into the White Company's portfolio.

Shortly after White purchased Oliver however, they would discontinue production of Cletrac models in 1965.

And thus brough the end to Cletrac, though White would offer tractors afterwards under the White name.

That's all for today - thanks for looking!