Category: 2015

Hall of Fame Inductee Class of 2015 Neil Schmidgall, whose career began as a Minnesota sand-and-gravel producer, founded Superior Industries in 1972. As a man who started as an aggregate producer, Schmidgall realized equipment mobility was necessary to meet the needs of an industry that required action from site to site. He applied his engineering…

Hall of Fame Inductee Class of 2015 Paul Detwiler III, president and CEO of New Enterprise Stone & Lime Co., has carried on the traditions of his family-owned company whose origins trace back nearly a century. Today, New Enterprise Stone & Lime is a top 25 U.S. aggregate-producing company and a top 10 crushed-stone producer.…

Hall of Fame Inductee Class of 2015 Eli Whitney Blake, a 19th-century inventor, found a less costly and more efficient way to crush stone when he developed a rock crusher in 1851 that he patented by the end of the same decade. Before Blake’s invention, stones were crushed with hand hammers in what amounted to…

Hall of Fame Inductee Class of 2015 Glen Barton, who joined Caterpillar as a trainee in 1961, led the company into the 21st century during a career that spanned nearly 43 years. Barton was named chairman and CEO of the company in 1999, emphasizing diversification of products and services during his five-year leadership term. He…

Neil Schmidgall didn’t invent the portable conveyor, but his customers and employees say he made significant advancements to perfect them in the 1990s. Schmidgall, founder of Superior Industries in Morris, Minn., led the company as it developed a number of portable equipment advancements, including the FD Axle, which is still influential to the industry today.…

A high-volume aggregate producer doesn’t become a top U.S. producer overnight. A series of growth-related moves are usually made, and those moves are typically made over a period of years, even decades. New Enterprise Stone & Lime Co. Inc., a Pennsylvania-based aggregate producer with more than 90 years of history, has followed that model of…

Two hundred years ago, building a two-mile macadam road was a daunting task. Today, it’s not a problem because of Eli Whitney Blake’s stone crusher. Born in 1795 in Westborough, Mass., Blake had the family talent for creative thinking and devising innovative solutions to challenging tasks. His father was a farmer, and his uncle, Eli…

Glen Barton was destined to “bleed yellow” since he was five years old, when his father purchased the first family tractor. “At six or seven, I could drive it and do everything you could do with a farm tractor,” says Glen Barton, retired chairman and CEO of Caterpillar. “It was sort of in your blood.”…