Clark Equipment Company

Clark Equipment Company was an American designer, manufacturer, and seller of industrial and construction machinery and equipment.

Clark's predecessor was the George R. Rich Manufacturing Company, founded in 1903 in Chicago, Illinois by executives of the Illinois Steel Company.

The company moved to Buchanan, Michigan in 1904 when that city's chamber of commerce advertised a financially sound deal with respect to industrial rent and power supply.

Eugene B. Clark, an Illinois Steel employee at the time, determined that the metallurgy of Rich Manufacturing's principal product, a railroad rail drill named the Celfor Drill, was faulty, and also found fault with both the management and basic operations, which he ultimately corrected after the condition of him becoming an equal partner was established.

In 1916 he merged Rich Manufacturing, which by then had been renamed Celfor Tool, and Buchanan Electric Steel Company, an offshoot of the former, and formed Clark Equipment Company, named after Clark.

In 1919 a division called Clark Tructractor Company was formed. This still exists as Clark Material Handling Company.

From the 1920s until the 1960s, Clark made many acquisitions and continued to grow as a company, but in the 1960s and again in the 1980s, many were sold.

In 1935-1936, Clark built a one-of-a-kind aluminum body trolley (a PCC streetcar) that ran in Brooklyn and Queens, New York, until 1956. This trolley is preserved at the Trolley Museum of New York and is listed on the New York State Register of Historic Places.

In 1954 was founded in Brazil the sucursal from Clark Equipments in Valinhos, a city near São Paulo where gears and transmissions for trucks begun to be produced for the South American Market. That plant also has produces lifts and construct machinery. The Brazilian plant still was leader for mechanical transmissions until 1995 when was sold to Eaton Corporation.

In 1995, Clark was acquired by Ingersoll Rand.

In 1996, Ingersoll Rand donated two tons of Clark archives to the Berrien County Historical Association, and the Berrien County 1839 Courthouse Museum is now the Clark archives repository.

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