N C Machinery celebrates 75 years as Caterpillar dealer

Alaska’s dominant mercantile company transformed by addition of Caterpillar line of heavy equipment

By Steve Sutherlin

PNA Managing Editor

In 1926, Northern Commercial Co. signed a sales and service agreement with the newly formed Caterpillar Tractor company to be the exclusive Caterpillar dealer for Alaska and the Yukon.

Seventy-five years later, the company, as N C Machinery Co. is thriving and still selling and servicing Caterpillar equipment in the state of Alaska.

That 1926 agreement was to change the face of a mercantile company that traced its roots in Alaska to 1776, just as the familiar yellow Cat machinery was to change the face of Alaska.

In 1926 Northern Commercial Co. was the dominant trading company in the then-territory of Alaska, providing groceries and general merchandise and equipment to trappers, explorers and gold seekers. Its mercantile trade was profitable, but the company had a strict policy against price gouging desperate miners. Store managers were instructed to provide food and clothing free of charge should a destitute prospector suffering from “extreme need” appear at the doorstep.

The stores of Northern Commercial and its predecessor, Alaska Commercial Co., were a center for community activities, serving as post office, community hall, courtroom, marriage parlor, funeral home and a safe haven for travelers. Customers traded with pelts, gold, artifacts, fish and sometimes with paper money. The company played a vital role in Alaska life and prided itself on being a responsible member of the community.

Just a year before Northern Commercial Co. signed the Caterpillar agreement, territorial Gov. Scott C. Bone called on the company as the largest organization in the Yukon area to organize 20 dogsled drivers for an emergency delivery of diphtheria antitoxin serum to Nome. No other transportation was available. The only two airplanes available were in Fairbanks and were dismantled for the winter.

With the lives of Nome’s children at stake, the serum went by train from Anchorage to Nenana, and then was carried 674 miles by dog team relay race. It arrived in Nome on Feb. 2, 1925; just 12 days after Dr. Curtis Welch diagnosed the diphtheria outbreak there.

In Fairbanks, the company once sacrificed 2,000 pounds of bacon from its stores to fire the power plant so that firefighters would have enough water pressure to fight a fire that threatened most of the city, according to a company-published history.

In October 1999 Commissioner Michele Brown of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation presented the Anchorage branch of N C Machinery a “Beyond Compliance” award. The award recognizes Alaska companies that go above and beyond the call of duty to protect the state’s environment and to help promote healthy communities.

Season of the Cat

As the company evolved to supply the region’s miners, it was building a relationship with an industry that has for 75 years been the mainstay of its heavy equipment business.

Machines could move more in one day than a miner with pick and shovel could move in a month. The Caterpillar product line caught on quickly with Northern Commercial’s mining clientele. Bulldozers and track type tractors pushed mining efficiency to a new level in the state.

In the 1940s military construction lifted sales of the company’s machinery division to a new high. But it was renewed gold mining activity in Nome and the Klondike in the early 1950s that lofted machinery division sales above retail sales in 1957, the company said.

The company profited from the coming of the oil industry in the late 1950s. It supplied more than 1,500 machines for the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline. Caterpillar machines and generators continue to serve the pipeline today.

In 1974 Northern Commercial was divided into three companies. The department stores in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Kenai were sold to Nordstrom. The machinery division was sold to the Skinner Corp. of Seattle. In 1977, the remaining eleven rural stores were sold to the Community Enterprise Development Corp. of Alaska, and eventually became the basis of today’s Alaska Commercial Co.Two divisions of N C now serve Alaska under the ownership of the Harnish Group of Seattle. N C Machinery sells and services Caterpillar construction and mining equipment. N C Power Systems sells and services generators, marine engines and truck engines. The company has branches in Anchorage, Juneau, Fairbanks and Dutch Harbor.

Mechanics say Caterpillar listens to them and incorporates their suggestions to make the equipment more reliable and more serviceable. They like the product. But service is what has made N C Machinery a success, according to Robert Opple, the company’s marketing director.

“No matter what kind of equipment the customer is running, they want it serviced, and they need it running,” he said.

N C mechanics regularly fly into remote areas of the state to service equipment.

Gene Sanderson, product support manager, began as an apprentice mechanic with the company 25 years ago. He remembers a service call made 19 years ago on the Richardson Highway near Valdez. He shimmied down a rope 150 feet to a grader on a narrow ledge cut 150 feet above a river gorge.

“I held on with one hand the entire time I worked on it,” he said.

Sanderson has worked by truck headlight in -60 degrees F and blowing winds, and has seen the state’s finicky weather turn a trip to do a 15-minute job into a four-day ordeal. That’s all in a day’s work for the Caterpillar dealer in the largest and most rugged state in the nation.