One of the Austrian stained glass windows along the south aisle of the church is dedicated to Urban Geier, who immigrated to Washington in the autumn of 1853. It depicts St. Boniface, the Apostle of the Germans, baptizing a convert…more on that later.

In some ways, Geier typifies a coming-to-America narrative common to our parish’s German founders; heighted by the enormous economic transformation in the national capital as a result of the Civil War, which attracted so many to the city. In Washington, however, was Geier’s singular destiny as a man of extraordinary talent, who came to the capital specifically because of an enormous and unique project underway in the decade preceding that war.

Geier was born in 1819 and grew up in a Germany where the trades and professions in the decorative arts flourished. As a young artist living in Konigheim, Baden-Wuerttemberg – married with five little girls – he heard about sweeping plans to extend and enlarge the U.S. Capitol in the small, post-War, (then) largely seasonal Federal City. Engineer Montgomery Meigs and architect Thomas U. Walter planned to more than double the building’s size in the classical idiom of the Italian Renaissance. Highly skilled decorative technicians and artists would be in high demand. Many of these came from Germany and, in 1853, Geier herded his family aboard the steamer Rhine headed for the New World.

Soon after Geier arrived, the great Italian fresco artist Constantino Brumidi, who spent more than 25 years embellishing the U.S. Senate and Capitol Rotunda, hired Geier to be one of his technicians – mixing delicate fresco pigments and preparing the full-scale “cartoons” that served as the artist’s guide for the highly difficult paint-on-wet-plaster fresco process. For the next decade, Geier worked with Brumidi to complete one of the Capitol’s great masterpieces, the ceiling of S-211 intended for the Senate Library, now the Lyndon B. Johnson Room. Even long after Brumidi’s death in 1880, Geier worked for the Architect of the Capitol until 1890s when he was past 70 years old. He served alongside some of the most talented German – and Italian – artists of his time to make America’s national legislature the architectural jewel that it is today.

For most of those years that Geier worked on the Capitol, he lived with his wife, Catherine (Hafner) and seven girls (two were born after they came to the United States – one died as a child) at 407 New York Avenue, NW, five blocks due north of St. Mary’s. This is now the site of the Yale Laundry Condominiums.

Geier was very active in the parish as a member of the men’s benevolent St. Bonifatius and St. Joseph Societies. Undoubtedly, he was instrumental in the drive to build the present church in 1890 after the congregation outgrew the old 1846 edifice. In fact, it would be very reasonable to infer that he is directly responsible for securing his artist colleague from the Capitol, fellow German and nationally renowned painter Johannes Adam Oertel, to paint the original apse paintings of the “Five Joyful Mysteries” that hung in the sanctuary niches for nearly a century.

In some ways too, Geier’s own story mirrors the demographics of Washington’s German Catholic community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Geier and most of his family continued to reside in St. Mary’s parish well after his death in 1907, his twin sister, Katarina Geier (Howard) moved eastward to St. Joseph’s parish on Capitol Hill after marrying a local butcher – also from Baden – named John Howard. St. Joseph’s, across the street from today’s Hart Senate Office Building, was also completed in 1891 (just six months before the present St. Mary's). The Germans at St. Joseph’s, however, shared their parish with the Irish, a common juxtaposition in many American neighborhoods at that time.

When Geier died, he and his sister, who died in 1910, were heralded in the papers as the oldest surviving twins “…in the world.” Perhaps this is media hyperbole, but at least it is certain that they were among the oldest residents, and certainly twins, in the District of Columbia. Geier was given the sacred exequies of a solemn high Mass at St. Mary’s. His casket was preceded into the church by a procession of 50 men from the St. Bonifatius and St. Joseph’s Societies. The pews were packed with family and mourners.

He was survived by six daughters, 11 grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren. He is buried with his wife, who died in 1867 so many years earlier than he, and with other members of his family, in the parish’s churchyard, St. Mary’s Cemetery, near Catholic University.