Boniface Wimmer was not satisfied with the establishment of an art center and art curriculum at St. Vincent. He wanted to introduce the religious art of the Old World to the newly founded regional Catholic establishments in the New World.

    In 1862 he sent the Benedictine Fr. Odilio von der Gruen to be pastor of Saint Joseph parish at Covington, Kentucky. Covington was located across from Cincinnati on the Ohio River and had attracted a large number of German Catholics in the 1840's and 1850's. Father Odilio recognized the need of mission churches for beautiful altars, altarpieces, and mural paintings. He asked Abbot Wimmer to send some lay-brothers from St. Vincent to help out. Wimmer chose Br. Cosmas Wolf, who had studied at the Munich Royal Academy of Art with a well-known sculptor for five years, and had recently returned to Latrobe. Br. Claude Hauesler, another lay-brother, went along as a laborer. Cosmas Wolf established an Altar Building Stock Company in Covington and became its chief designer and business manager. Starting in the fall of 1862 the Company designed and built altars, baptismal fonts, confessionals and pulpits. Skilled local workers assisted with the carpentry, and artists were hired to gild and paint. The Company's workshop was located in a frame building at the corner of Bush and Greenup streets in Covington. The Altar Building Stock Company - also known as the Institute of Catholic Art - remained in Covington for about ten years and then moved to St. Vincent, where Br. Cosmas continued to work for various parishes.[1]

   Unfortunately only the bare outline of the life and artistic career of Cosmas Wolf is known. He was born in Grosskissendorf in Swabia in 1822 and came to North America in 1852 to join the Benedictine Order at St. Vincent in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, as a lay-brother. (A lay-brother is a monk, who does not seek ordination and does not administer the sacraments, but works to supply the needs of the monastery). In 1857 Br. Cosmas Wolf was sent from St. Vincent to the Munich Royal Academy of Art for further studies in sculpture and religious art. At the St. Vincent Archabbey archives fifty-eight original, signed drawings by Cosmas Wolf can still be viewed. They are designs for church altars, wall paintings, baptismal fonts, chalices, and even a rectory building. Most of them are ink drawings with wash and pencil on paper. Each one is exquisite in detail and coloring. They are a testimony of the artistic talent of the Benedictine lay-brother. (Figure 5, Cosmas Wolf, Design for a high altar at St. Peter's, Indiana, 1864). Once placed in charge of the Covington Altar Building Stock Company, Br. Wolf also developed astounding administrative talents.

   The Covington Altar Building Stock Company was a productive institution that fulfilled the needs of Catholic German-Americans for the decoration of their new churches in North America during the second half of the nineteenth century. The initiative of the Benedictine Archabbot Boniface Wimmer, and the dedication of the individual artists and craftsmen were unparalleled in the annals of American art. The Covington-based church decorators were grounded in the tradition of German Gothic art. It served them well, since a Gothic Revival movement dominated architecture and design in the United States beginning in the 1830's and lingering into the 1870's. Just as in Europe a few decades earlier, the American Gothic Revival attempted to recreate an idealized vision of the Middle Ages.

  The Covington artists did not design churches. There were no architects among them. However, they were aware of the trends that governed ecclesiastical buildings, and this knowledge helped them to adjust the altars, murals, and other furnishings to the building style of the churches. Architectural historians agree that a " distinctly German-Catholic church architecture flourished in North America between 1865 and 1910."[2] It might be puzzling to the layman that such a German Gothic style became prominent only in the 1860's. One explanation for this late arrival of the German Gothic points to the curriculum at German schools of architecture, where detailed instruction in medieval styles was still spotty in the 1840's and 1850's.However, the immigrant architects from Germany, who arrived on these shores in the 1860's, had been thoroughly trained in earlier historic styles by that time. They brought with them illustrated books with elevations, ground plans, exterior and interior views of famous Gothic churches in Cologne, Freiburg, Marburg, and other sites.[3]  That accounts for the fact that many German-American Catholic parish churches resemble scaled down medieval cathedrals with twin towers, three gabled entrance portals and a rose window on the western façade. In the interior the German-American churches were modeled on the Hallenkirchen of the Middle Ages. They differed considerably from the narrow interiors of French and English Gothic cathedrals. In the German churches the center aisle is wider and taller than the side aisles. The Hallenkirchen also feature a shallow, rounded apse for the high altar and two flat apses, each with a side altar. The main advantage of such an interior design is the creation of a unified open space.[4] In any event, the Catholic German-Americans felt secure and proud of their heritage in the new churches, resembling familiar structures they had left behind in their homeland. These new churches fulfilled the need for a home and a holy place that protected them from the unfamiliar surroundings they encountered in American towns and villages.