(click to enlarge photos)
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.
What a wonderful story! I had no idea, tho I grew up on Magnolia in the ’50’s and ’60’s and later on Queen Anne, and later still owned a houseboat on Westlake. I have driven by this building probably thousands of times in my life of 78 years, and i have always loved it, been drawn to it. The beautiful old brick has always intrigued me. It is so satisfying to learn some of its history and that of the family. Sincere thanks.