FRED ZWICKY/JOURNAL STAR
East Peoria’s Building SS is the manufacturing home of Caterpillar Inc’s D10, a trendsetting track-type dozer that is one of Caterpillar’s largest dozers in the company lineup. The company celebrated the 40th anniversary of the D10 in 2017. The D10 represented a significant advance in the design of tracks using an elevated sprocket.

•October 10, 2018•

By Steve Tarter
Of the Journal Star

Peoria wasn’t always a company town. It was a distillery town, a farm implement town and a river town before the Caterpillar Tractor Co. set up shop.
A bond developed between company and town that became a mutually-beneficial relationship.
Caterpillar rose to international prominence on the strength of rugged, reliable earthmoving machines while the Peoria area gained jobs — not only in bustling factories but at the headquarters of a Fortune 100 company, a rare distinction for a city of a population of 100,000.
But in 2017, that symbiotic relationship underwent a dramatic change. Caterpillar announced two things that reverberated across central Illinois: one, the company ditched plans for an expansive office project in Downtown Peoria that Caterpillar had promised with great fanfare just two years earlier, and, two, the corporate headquarters would move to the Chicago area.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.