Mason Motor Car Company Des Moines Iowa

Mason Motor Co. ad, 1906

The first thing you need to know about the Mason Motor Car Company is that it never should have worked. Not in Des Moines, not in 1906, not in a state where most people still trusted a good horse over any contraption that hissed, rattled, and tried to kill you on a dirt road. Yet for a few bright, reckless years, two brothers with machine oil on their hands and speed on their minds tried to drag Iowa—kicking, screaming, and occasionally bleeding—into the automobile age.

Fred and August Duesenberg weren’t normal. They looked at a peaceful bicycle and thought, What if this thing went 60 miles an hour and tried to shake its rider’s fillings out? The Des Moines Daily News called them “the sort of young men who consider mechanical noise to be a form of conversation.” They were tinkerers, racers, mechanics, engineers—whatever you want to call them—but above all, they were hungry. Hungry for speed, recognition, and the clean snapping sound an engine makes when it finds its rhythm and behaves. So when Des Moines attorney Edward Mason threw some money at them and said, “Make a car,” they didn’t hesitate. They built the Mason, a small, explosive two-cylinder machine that rattled windows, terrified horses, and made its owners feel like they were cheating death—or at least borrowing trouble from it.

 

The Duesenberg boys approached the automobile business like mad scientists who heard a ticking beneath the workbench and thought, That sounds promising. They built engines that revved like cornered animals and cars that punched far above their weight. Motor Age magazine took notice early, calling it “a lively little runabout with the temperament of a racing dog.” The Mason wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t a luxury machine dripping chrome and leather. It was a fast little Iowa mule with an engine that refused to quit and a price tag that said, Trust us, it’s worth it. The company bragged that it was the fastest two-cylinder car in America, which was probably true. The Duesenbergs never let facts get in the way of their engineering, and the funny thing was—they didn’t have to. The proof was on the racetrack.

 

Original Mason Motor Car, 1906

They tested their ideas there because racing is the purest, most honest form of mechanical truth-telling. If your car is weak, racing exposes it. If it’s brilliant, racing sets it free. And the Mason was fast—dangerously fast, for a machine that looked like a wagon with ambition. In 1908, after a particularly brutal sweep at a fairground track in Missouri, a writer for The Horseless Age warned, “The Mason car has no respect for larger machines and chases them down like a terrier after a butcher’s cart.” Newspapers called the brothers the Iowa Speed Kings, which was generous but not wrong. Crowds packed into fairgrounds just to see the Mason spit dust, belch smoke, and streak across the finish line before anyone else had figured out what happened.

 

Inside the Des Moines factory, the operation was more optimism than structure. The Iowa State Register wrote, “There is a hum in the Mason shop that suggests both industry and cheerful chaos.” Workers hand-built the cars, one at a time, while the Duesenbergs stalked the shop floor like predatory birds, tweaking, adjusting, tuning, making sure every Mason left the plant ready to embarrass the competition. The cars came in a few flavors—runabouts for young daredevils, touring cars for respectable families willing to gamble on new technology, and the Gentleman’s Roadster, a name that sounded like it should include a free bottle of hair tonic.

 

Around 500 cars rolled out in 1909, which sounds impressive until you remember Ford was over in Detroit building so many Model Ts he practically changed the shape of American society. Meanwhile, in Iowa, things were… different. Not bad, not hopeless—just held together with bolts and bravado. The Des Moines Tribune said it best when it reported, “The Mason works feel like the birth of something large happening in a very small room.” It was optimism backed by horsepower and hope, the enterprise only possible before mass production hardened the automobile business into an industrial meat grinder.

 

Mason motor car climbing steps of the state capitol
in Des Moines, Iowa, 1906

Then Frederick Maytag showed up. Yes, that Maytag. He’d made a fortune convincing Americans they didn’t have to scrub clothes by hand, and now he wanted into the automobile game. Maybe he saw the Mason and thought, These boys are brilliant, but they’re one loose bolt away from blowing up the shop. 

 

He bought the company in 1910, packed up the tools, moved everything to Waterloo, and rechristened it the Maytag-Mason Motor Company. The Waterloo Courier announced the move with the hopeful headline: “A New Automobile Giant for the State.” In the process, Maytag accidentally smothered the spark that made the Mason special. Not intentionally—he wasn’t a villain. He simply didn’t understand that the Mason wasn’t a product; it was a Duesenberg fever dream built from desperation, genius, and Iowa dirt. The Duesenberg brothers didn’t engineer cars—they summoned them. When they lost control of the design, the soul leaked out of the machine.

 

By 1912, the whole thing collapsed. Maytag had sunk money into redesigns no one wanted, sales dried up, and the world was moving toward mass production at a pace no Iowa automaker could match. Ford had the assembly line; Mason had talent, heart, and a factory that creaked when the wind changed. The Maytag-Mason venture folded with barely a whimper. The Waterloo Times-Tribune said, “The Mason name, once a lively presence on our roads, fades quietly into the ledger.”

 

The Duesenbergs walked away—broke, bruised, and itching for a bigger stage. They took everything they’d learned from the Mason years and headed off to build roaring racing machines, airplane engines, and eventually the Duesenberg Model J, a car so powerful and beautiful that even cynical reporters had to admit it was something close to mechanical royalty. But none of that would have happened without the Mason. The Mason was their rough draft—where the Duesenbergs learned how to build a car that didn’t just run—it wanted to run.

 

Today, the Mason Motor Car Company is a footnote, a curiosity, a whisper in the long, noisy story of American automotive history. But the spark is still there. A few Masons survive in museums and private collections, their engines still capable of that particular Duesenberg growl that sounds half mechanical, half animal. You don’t need to be a mechanic to appreciate it. You just need ears and a pulse.

 

Because for a few wild years in Des Moines, Iowa, was home to a pair of speed-obsessed brothers who refused to accept the world as it was. They wanted more. They wanted faster. They wanted better. And with the Mason, they damn near pulled it off. It’s a miracle the company existed at all. It’s even more impressive that it burned so brightly. In true gonzo fashion, the Mason Motor Car Company lived fast, died young, and left behind a legacy that thundered far beyond Iowa’s borders. If that isn’t the American automotive dream, I don’t know what is.