Mother Mary Augustine Giesen
The Sisters of St. Francis in Maryville have their roots with the Sisters of St. Mary across the state of Missouri in St. Louis. The group built their first hospital there in 1877, and six sisters led by Mother Mary Augustine Giesen left St. Louis in 1894 to establish a new congregation.
In the 1890s, when the sisters first came to Maryville, the US was in a depression, and the sisters who arrived in Maryville wanted to focus on three main areas of work: first being modern health care that cities had at the time, second being the care and education of children, and third being the care of the elderly.
Mother Augustine was an important figure to the Sisters of St. Francis and their efforts in Maryville. As one of the first sisters to arrive in Maryville with the order in 1894, she believed in their divine mission their to help people in rural America who had no easy access to sophisticated or institutionalized healthcare at that point. She was popular in the order and would serve as their mother for a time until her death. She was said to be ever faithful to the orders founding mission: “to be the presence of the loving, serving, compassionate, healing Jesus.”
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Her Life at a Glance
Mother Augustine was born on Dec. 6, 1860 in New Prague, Minnesota. At the age of 14 she joined the Sisters of St. Mary in St. Louis, Missouri. When she was 19, she joined the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis. At a young age she engaged in medical practice out of necessity for living on the frontier of Minnesota where families looked out for one another.
It is believed that part of her reasoning for joining the first group of Sisters who came to Maryville was that she had a religious calling to help people in rural America. This was more than likely influenced by her experiences with the situations she encountered living on the frontier.
She was the last mother superior of the order while they were still located at the St. Francis Hospital. She had made the decision to move the motherhouse in 1948. Shortly after the move to Mt. Alverno, located just east of Maryville, Mother Augustine died in 1950 at the age of eighty-nine. Firsthand accounts say that on her deathbed she was surrounded by friends and family both of the clergy and secular.