On Thanksgiving Day in 1904, a farm machinery maker in Stockton, California, tried something new.

He took one of his steam engines, pulled off the wheels and bolted on tracks made of wooden slats. He was building for the soft peat fields of the river delta, where heavy wheeled machines sank.

Most investors couldn't tell you that story. But nearly everyone has seen what came of it. The company it led to has paid a cash dividend every year since it was formed. And it has paid higher annual dividends 32 years in a row. Through 2001... 2008... 2020... every year, more than the year before.

Today, we'll show you how two rivals who spent years in court ended up as one company. We'll show you why its small dividend yield is the wrong number to look at. And we'll tell you whether it made our list of 25 holdings this quarter.

Let's start at the beginning...

Benjamin Holt and his brothers started the Stockton Wheel Company in 1883. It grew into Holt Manufacturing, a maker of combine harvesters and big steam engines for California farms.

The machines had one problem. In the delta's peat soil, they sank.

So Holt replaced the wheels on a 40 horsepower steam engine, Number 77, with wooden tracks bolted to chains. On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1904, he tested it in the soft fields near Stockton. It worked.

Two years later, the Holts started an engine company to move from steam to gasoline.

Keep that engine company in mind. We'll come back to it.

In San Leandro, California, Daniel Best built harvesters and tractors of his own. After a patent fight with Holt, he retired and sold most of his company to Holt.

His son, C. L. Best, did not go quietly. In 1910 he left and started his own tractor company, and it became Holt's toughest competitor.

The two sides fought over patents, a trademark and contracts. Over roughly a decade, they spent about $1.5 million on legal fees, when a dollar went much further than it does today.

In World War I, Holt's track tractors hauled Allied guns and supplies. They also helped inspire the idea of the tank, though the first British tanks were a British design built by a British firm.

When the war ended, Holt had the famous name and the big factories. Best had the stronger finances and the better designs. Benjamin Holt died in 1920.

A San Francisco bond broker who had helped finance Best proposed a merger. Without one, he believed, both companies might go under.

In the spring of 1925, they did. C. L. Best took charge of the combined company. It has paid a cash dividend every year since.

A deep recession cut demand. A strong dollar made its machines expensive overseas. A Japanese rival sold similar machines for far less. And in 1982, workers went on strike for about seven months.

That year, the company posted its first annual loss in half a century.

It lost nearly $1 billion over three years. By 1984, it was losing more than $1 million a day. It announced plans to close plants in the U.S. and Britain.

In 1985, a new chief executive took over and began a long overhaul of its factories. That same year, it returned to a profit.

And through all of it, the cash dividend kept coming.

The company called 2025 its centennial year. Sales and revenues reached $67.6 billion, the highest in its history.

Profit per share fell, though, to $18.81 from $22.05, as higher tariffs raised its costs and its prices slipped.

And remember that engine company?

In 2025, the biggest part of the business was power and energy: engines, turbines and related equipment. It had $32.2 billion of sales that year. In the second quarter of 2026, its power generation sales rose 29%, mostly for data centers.

The new year has started strong. In that same quarter, sales and revenues topped $20 billion for the first time, up 24%. The order backlog reached $72.1 billion at the end of June, up from $51.2 billion at the start of the year.

Here's what the last ten years looked like.

As of October 1, this stock yielded just 0.8%.

Plenty of income investors would see that number and move on. That number hides most of the story.

Look at the table again. The dividend grew from $3.08 a share in 2016 to $5.94 last year, about 7.6% a year.

So why is the yield so small? Because the share price compounded much faster. Ten years ago, the shares traded at about $88. On October 1, they closed at $826.35.

From 2016 through 2025, the company also spent about $33.7 billion buying back its own stock, more than the $22.7 billion it paid in dividends. Its share count fell by about a fifth.

The dividend is one part of it. The rest came from a growing business, and from investors paying more for each dollar of its earnings.

And the dividend has plenty of cover. Last year, dividends used about 29 cents of every dollar of free cash flow from its industrial business.

Its machines go to construction, mining and energy, and those customers buy less when times are hard. Profit per share fell about 15% in 2025, and in 2016 the company posted a small loss.

Tariffs add to the pressure. The company expects about $2.2 billion of tariff costs in 2026.

Then there's the debt. The company owes about $45 billion, but about three quarters of that belongs to its financing arm, which lends to customers and dealers. Its industrial business owes about $10.7 billion.

And the price already reflects a lot of good news. The share price is about 9.4 times what it was ten years ago, and investors can see the backlog too. When a cyclical stock is priced for good times, a downturn can cut both its earnings and what investors will pay for them.

Look at what this company has already come through over a century. It began as two rivals who spent years in court. It nearly fell apart in the 1980s and kept paying its dividend. It has paid higher annual dividends 32 years in a row. And engines, the bet its founders made in 1906, were its biggest business in 2025.

Think you know? Hit reply and tell us your guess. We read every reply.

Subscribers to The Dividend Record Portfolio can see the answer right below. They'll also see whether it's one of our 25 holdings this quarter, and the numbers behind the story: where a decade of returns actually came from, how well the dividend is covered, what today's price assumes, and how the stock has held up when the market fell apart.