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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 9, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 12, 2025

For 140 years, Wilson Machine Works has made bricks, boats, inventions

By Jean Sherrard

What inspires a family for nearly 140 years? At Wilson Machine Works on Elliott Avenue just south of the Magnolia Bridge, the answer lies in sparks, steel and a stubborn love for problem-solving.

The Wilsons trace their Seattle roots to German immigrant Robert Niedergesaess, a master brickmaker who had lived in New Zealand for 12 years, arrived alone in Seattle in 1887 and two years later brought his family north. In Seattle they found both a home and a vocation. His son, Robert John Niedergesaess, later changed the family name to the easier to spell and pronounce Wilson.

Today, Wilson Machine Works remains a family enterprise, housed in a 1926 shop constructed with

the very bricks the family once manufactured. Built during Seattle’s industrial expansion and run by its founder’s descendants, the shop reflects a family business that evolved from brickmaking to boat building and eventually to elevator repair. Along the way, generations of Wilsons have patented inventions such as high-efficiency brick-pressing dies and specialized marine propellers, many of whose basic ideas remain in use

today.

“It’s about using your brain,” says Dave Wilson, the 82-year-old great-grandson of founder Robert Niedergesaess. “We get to figure things out that nobody else can.”

His son and business partner Max Wilson agrees. “We get to play with metal and fire,” he adds with a grin.

Max coined a family motto, what Dave calls a “Maxism”: “At Wilson Machine Works, the impossible takes just a little longer.”

Niedergesaess founded Seattle Brick and Tile Company using a patented brick-pressing method that dramatically increased production. His timing proved fortuitous. When the city rebuilt its downtown with brick and stone after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, demand for fireproof materials surged.

Within a decade, the company was producing 6 million bricks annually from rich clay deposits in Interbay and South Seattle.

Prosperity encouraged experimentation. The family expanded into marine engineering, building boats and engines for Puget Sound’s mosquito fleet — the swarm of private steamboats that served as the region’s primary highway system before roads and bridges. They launched more than a dozen vessels — all bearing “Yankee” in their name — on Elliott Bay. Later generations moved into propeller manufacturing and other mechanical innovations.

As a boy, Dave Wilson remembers stepping outside the family shop and fishing from nearby docks. “I pulled salmon right out of the bay,” he says. Since then decades of fill have pushed the shoreline several hundred feet west, transforming Elliott Bay into Elliott Avenue.

As the geography shifted, so did the vocation. Since the mid-1960s, Wilsons have specialized in repairing the complex gears of elevators, beginning with Smith Tower.

Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, 3-year-old William Wilson already delights in exploring the century-old shop, roaming its maze of machines and metal and flipping switches that bring the old motors humming to life.

Dave watches with quiet pride: “I think we’re looking at the sixth generation here.”

WEB EXTRAS

To watch our onsite narrated 360 degree video, click here.

Also, see Paul Dorpat’s Jan. 12, 1992, “Now & Then” on the same subject below.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 2, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 5, 2026

‘Invisible’ stories of century-old Harbor Island come alive in April

By Clay Eals

Harbor Island could be the most visible invisible place in Seattle.

Noticeable to anyone viewing the waterfront from any angle, it’s a busy south-end industrial center and catalyst for international commerce. Yet for most, it’s off the beaten path. Unless you’re among the 2,000 who make a daily living there or you pilot trucks, trains and ships to and from, it can be a mysterious place.

Elke Hautala of Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood and Cari Simson of Edmonds aim to change that. The friends operate Lake City-based Invisible Histories, an educational enterprise supported by a nonprofit fiscal sponsorship. Their playful logo cleverly combines a shovel and microphone.

The initial foray of these pop historians came five years ago when they forged the Halloween season’s popular Georgetown Haunted History Tours. They have branched into monthly podcasts and live shows that seek to entertain while they inform. In that vein, their next retro extravaganza on Thursday and Friday, April 23 and 24, focuses on Harbor Island.

The fundamental fact about the 397-acre island is that before 1909, it simply didn’t exist.

Trade ambitions sparked by imminent completion of the 1914 Panama Canal triggered a multi-decade transformation of Seattle’s only riverbed. Mudflats and shifting channels at the Duwamish River’s mouth thus became an artificial land bar, composed of 24 million cubic yards of dirt dredged from the straightened, widened and deepened waterway and sliced from the city’s regraded Denny and Beacon hills.

Seen from the air as roughly a trapezoid, Harbor Island boasts an equally irregular past — perfect grist for theatrics planned by Hautala and Simson.

For their April shows,  home base will be the ground-level soundstages of King County’s Harbor Island Studios, part of the island’s massive former Fisher Flouring Mill. From its opening in 1911, Fisher’s towering silos and a pervasive retail presence (including Fisher Scones, a staple of Northwest fairs) made the mill the island’s most eye-catching business until its 2002 closure.

Beyond the island’s evolution, the presentations will examine the site’s geologic and indigenous pre-history. It also will explore the waterway explosion of Russia-bound munitions pre-World War I, the Prohibition reign of Fisher family-connected bootleggers Roy and Elise Olmstead and a segregated Black soldier base nearby during World War II. Another topic: the infamous 1978 ramming of the low-level Spokane Street Bridge, which instigated the 140-foot-high West Seattle Bridge that soars above the island today.

The goal, Hautala and Simson say, is to assemble “artists, performers, filmmakers, storytellers, musicians and more to share diverse cultural and creative perspectives as we peel back the layers of Harbor Island history.”

In short, to make the invisible visible.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Elki Hautala and Cari Simson for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 6 additional photos and 8 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.