Here is some history on three of St. Mary's great founding pastors. All are buried in a row at our cemetery, Revs. Alig, who built the first church; Glaab, who built the present church; and Roth, who further beautified the present church respectively.

Fr. Mathias Alig:
The first pastor of St. Mary's. Born in Switzerland in 1803, son of wealthy farmers, he was asked by the archbishop of Baltimore to minister to German Catholics in Washington, DC, in the new parish established in 1845. The German community then was very small, but they clamored for their own church where they could hear sermons in their own language. At first, he celebrated Mass to a handful of about twenty immigrant families in a house owned by the Rupperts on 8th Street, NW. In 1846, as soon as he became pastor, he began negotiations and personally helped pay for land to be added to the existing parcels donated by General Van Ness for the construction of a German church. The cornerstone was laid on the feast of the Annunciation in 1846 and completed by October that year. Alig then paid for land and oversaw the construction of a school and convent, and invited the School Sisters of Notre Dame to teach there in 1853.

• In 1868, Alig helped the establishment of St. Joseph's on Capitol Hill to meet the needs of the growing German community in "East Washington."
• In 1869, Alig oversaw the establishment of St. Mary's Orphanage on the property that is now our parking lot and ultimately in the existing building from 1902 that housed the convent and orphanage right behind the school. That institution, also run by the School Sisters of Notre Dame, continued to admit orphans until 1914.
• In 1870, Alig personally paid $1,000 for the purchase of the land that is now St. Mary's Cemetery and paid off any remaining debt on the land so that the parish would hold perpetual title to the property. He presided over the consecration on the Feast of the Annunciation that year.
• Alig died in 1882 and bequeathed every penny he had to establish an endowment for the church and the school. His personal charity toward the parish and its establishment was the hallmark of his tenure at St. Mary's.
• When the original church was built in 1846, there were about 200 registered parishioners at St. Mary's. By the time Fr. Alig died in 1882, St. Mary's had grown to over 1,800 parishioners. The parish records show that he officiated at 2,771 baptisms and 521 weddings during his tenure.

Rev. Dr. George Glaab:
Fr. Glaab became pastor of St. Mary's in 1889 and oversaw the construction of our present church designed by Ephraim Francis Baldwin, the same architect as Caldwell Hall at Catholic University built just two years earlier. Glaab was young, vibrant, a noted scholar, and devoted to ministering to the poor and sick of the parish. Every account of him in the parish records shows that he was beloved by his parishioners. As a result of an illness he contracted administering the last rites to a dying, indigent parishioner during a snowy winter day (when he made his sick calls on foot), he died in 1900 at only 37 years old. Glaab was born in Baltimore in 1863 and was orphaned by the age of 17. He graduated from St. Mary's Seminary at the head of his class and was ordained by Cardinal Gibbons. He went on to Rome and earned his doctorate in Theology. Gibbons personally selected Glaab to assist with the preliminary investigation into the cause for beatification of Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, founder of the Sisters of Charity.

Fr. John Roth:
Cardinal Gibbons appointed Fr. Roth to become pastor of St. Mary's in 1911. He was born near Lintz on the Rhine in Germany in 1869, studied at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, and was ordained by Cardinal Gibbons. Roth arrived at St. Mary's to find a parish with some considerable debt and the twenty year-old church in need of some work. He embarked on a concerted effort to retire any outstanding accounts and beautify the interior of the church, which warranted a few improvements and additions to those in place for the dedication in 1890.

One of his first accomplishments after settling the finances was to commission the two marble angels flanking the high altar, designed by Francis Pustet in New York and sculpted in Italy. In 1920, he secured the four great bells from the McShane Bell Foundry in Baltimore, one of which is dedicated to former pastor Glaab, and he oversaw the installation of the Seth Thomas clockworks built in Connecticut. They are 100 years old this year. Roth also commissioned the three stained glass windows above the high altar depicting the Blessed Virgin surrounded by angels holding the scrolls proclaiming her "Sancta Maria Mater Dei." Before these were installed, the arched openings had been covered over with decorative wooden boards with religious paintings facing the sanctuary.

The parish accounts from his tenure read as a litany of "improvements," "repairs," and "furnishings." His other contributions to beautifying the interior we see today are: replacement of the wooden floors with mosaics throughout; the marble altar rail; the baptismal font; and the installation of the church's first electric lighting.

Fr. Roth died in 1922 and, in addition to his indefatigable work on the church, school, and convent, he was a witness to the vast changes affecting the German community as a result of WWI. The last sermon and announcements from the pulpit in German were made on November 11, 1917 because of prevailing public sentiment. And because of war regulations that made it compulsory for all unnaturalized Germans to leave Washington, he was forced to leave the parish from January 1918 to January 1919.

Fr. Alig, a native of Germany, was pastor of St. Mary's when he founded the parish cemetery in 1870. He is buried there along with Fathers Glaab (who built the present church in 1890) and Roth, who oversaw the parish after the turn of the twentieth century. With them are most of our founding families and their descendants. Many of the inscriptions on their headstones are in German. Here is an article from the "Washington Evening Star" on the consecration of the burial ground on the feast of the Annunciation in 1870 and the glorious ceremonies thereto.

There is no question that Francis Miller was instrumental in the effort to build a new church for the German Catholic community in 1890. There he is, prominently goateed standing behind Fr. Glaab's right shoulder in the portrait of leaders that was sealed into the new church’s cornerstone. A copy of the photo hangs in St. Mary’s vestibule. The pure white Carrara marble and alabaster St. Anthony altar in the baptistery was donated in Miller’s memory four years after his 1907 death.

Comparatively, little information exits on his life apart from the interesting tidbits we can piece together here. After emigrating from Hesse-Darnstadt, Germany, in 1847, he probably anglicized his name from Franz Müller or some variant thereof; there being no local census records of a Francis Miller prior to 1860. We do know one key fact for sure that underscores his prominent role in the parish and community. He rose in the ranks of the business community, as the owner of a bookbinder shop, to become the treasurer and a member of the board of directors of the Home Savings Bank of Washington, once the leading retail bank in the city, just up the street from St. Mary’s at Seventh and Massachusetts, NW. It merged with the American Security Bank in 1919.

Savings banks and neighborhood-based ethnic financial institutions were the backbone of Washington’s immigrant communities, providing targeted capital and investment in their booming post-Civil War city. These were designed to allow small businesses and average savers to pool resources and offer credit. The executive roster of the Home Savings bank in 1900 reads like a German Who’s-Who with well over half of the board having German names, several of these from leading St. Mary’s families; Miller, Ruppert, and Geier among them. Without a doubt, Miller’s access to financial institutions played a vital role in financing construction of the church building we have today.

While we know of Miller’s prominence in the Home Savings Bank, the rest of his life story comes from scant but compelling evidence. His grave site in St. Mary’s parish cemetery paints an interesting and sad picture. Miller had seven children and not a single one survived him when he died at eighty years old. Two children never made it past their first birthdays. A girl died at five. His three sons all died in or shortly before their twenties. Only his daughter Elizabeth lived into middle age and died in 1902, never marrying. He left no descendants.

His first two of three wives predeceased him as well. Catherine, his first wife, from Baden and the mother of all his children died in 1884 at the age of 56. His second wife of only a few years, Frances, died in 1888, the same year as one of his sons. She was only 48.

It is important to note here that, while nineteenth-century mortality rates overall in the United States were far better than in Europe, the death toll in cities like Washington was 10 to 15 percent higher than in rural areas due to tuberculosis, fevers, and other infectious, communicable diseases. This statistic could be even higher in certain years. The average life expectancy for adults was considerably shorter than it is now and children had a far greater risk of not surviving to adulthood. Death was much more a part of family life then than it is now.

Miller remarried a woman from the parish, Annie May, twenty-five years younger than he and the same age as his daughter, Elizabeth. She was the child of Phillip and Elisabeth May, also prominent figures in the founding of the parish (described in a previous post). Francis, Annie, and Elizabeth lived in the home Miller owned for years at 636 L Street, NW, five blocks northwest of the church, just behind the site of the old, well-known A.V. Italian Restaurant (for those who remember the old neighborhood).

He died beside his wife on April 4, 1907. An article from the Washington Post that day reports that he was active in the Home Savings Bank to the very end, having “…been present at a meeting of the executive board…[the day before] with no complaints of ill-health.” He went to bed the night of his death “…having eaten of Welsh rarebit and had complained of not feeling well.” He died in his sleep.