The Kolipinski family was among the earliest members of St. Mary’s congregation and contributed much to adorn the church we know today. The sculpted Carrera marble altar rail and the prominent sanctuary apse triptych window from Munich of angels holding the “Mater Dei” banner are the most visible of their generous gifts. 

Leopold Kolipinski was born in 1822 in Ksiaz, Poland, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. He immigrated to the United States in 1852 with Maria Montz and they wed soon thereafter. She was from Prussia. He was a cabinetmaker and set up shop in St. Mary’s neighborhood in a variety of locations over the years, and then finally in the 600-Block of I (Eye) Street, NW, where the Kolipinski family would have a base well into the Twentieth Century. 

They had three children before Maria died in 1867, Emilie  (1853 – 1923), Ottilie (1856 – 1862), and Louis Xavier (1859 – 1914), all baptized in the old St. Mary’s church. Emilie married Bavarian immigrant Leopold Weiss in 1886 at St. Mary’s, which is why the “Mater Dei” window is jointly dedicated to the Kolipinski and Weiss families. Leopold’s son Louis, however, warrants particular attention here. He eventually became one of Washington’s most successful doctors and a real estate tycoon in the young and growing national capital.

Regarding Louis, it is exceptional to note that in the 1870s and 1880s, on Leopold’s earnings as a cabinetmaker, he was able to send his son to Gonzaga College High School, the National College of Pharmacy, and then to Georgetown University to study medicine, where Louis graduated in 1883. 

The young doctor married Ella Soehngen, the daughter of German immigrants from Mainz and Prussia, in a lavish wedding at St. Mary’s in 1902. Washington’s society pages were replete with descriptions of the wedding party (a who’s-who of original St. Mary’s families), attendees, fashions, music, and the beautifully decorated church. “The Washington Times” article carries one of the few mentions of the old vault lights now unused that are still faintly visible way up along the arches of the side aisles, “St. Mary’s was beautifully illuminated with electric lights that studded the gothic ceiling.”

Louis set up his medical practice at home, where he remained at Sixth and I Streets until his sudden death in 1914. Newspaper articles reporting academic awards show the young Kolipinski children enrolled at St. Mary’s School, under the tutelage of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, where they excelled. He had six: Amelia (1903 -- 1987), Henrietta (1904 – 1980), Ottilie (1905 -- 1929), Elinore (1905 – 1955), Louis (1907 -- 1951), and Andrew (1910 – 1931), all baptized in the new St. Mary’s church. The family remained at number 631 well after Louis died until leaving St. Mary’s neighborhood in 1925 to live in their new big home with wraparound porches on Ingomar Street in Chevy Chase. Dr. Kolipinski was a fixture at St. Mary’s during his life. The records are replete with health and medical refences to him tending parishioners.

Dr. Kolipinski was doing quite well in the circles of medicine in the District of Columbia. Here, though, his success story in the city merges with so many who came before and after him… in real estate speculation. The young Kolipinski was heavily engaged in land acquisition and sales in many different parts of Washington. He owned lucrative commercial footage along Pennsylvania Avenue downtown, apartment buildings in some of the city’s fashionable neighborhoods, and a vast land tract ripe for development near Ft. Totten and Catholic University. He even sold the city government the land it purchased for its fine Art Deco style 1939 Municipal Building at Judiciary Square. Washington was and is a place where land has great value, and this real estate was rapidly appreciating in Kolipinski’s time. 

His family’s good fortune and their faith helped make St. Mary’s church the beautiful and holy place it is today. A year after the doctor’s death, Fr. John Roth (pastor 1911 to 1922) notes in his account books that a generous legacy gift of $10,000 had enabled him to retire St. Mary’s debts once and for all. This was almost certainly from Kolipinski’s estate. It is during Roth’s pastorate that the Kolipinski’s also paid for the altar rail and window described above. As with much of the original German congregation, once the family moved to Chevy Chase they began to attend their local parish, in this case Washington’s Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament, but St. Mary’s remained their spiritual home in death. The Kolipinski mausoleum at St. Mary’s cemetery is perhaps one of the grandest structures on the burial grounds. There and adjacent to it lie the remains of many in that family among the graves of so many of St. Mary’s original parishioners who built the church we know today. May they rest in peace.