The History of Geiger & Peters page 1

Starting as an Indianapolis ornamental and miscellaneous steel shop and becoming a steel fabrication industry leader in the mid-western United States, Geiger & Peters has filled nearly a century with accomplishments in a competitive and economically sensitive business. It continues a family heritage that weathered challenges and prospered. It helped build Indianapolis and its own reputation for reliability, versatility, and efficiency in the custom fabrication and erection of structural steel.

The company was founded in 1905 by John Geiger and Carl L. Peters, both members of Indianapolis' sizable German immigrant community. The two met as employees of Tobias Roach, a manufacturer of structural and ornamental steel. Sharing, as they did, knowledge of the field and entrepreneurial inclinations, they agreed to become partners.

Geiger & Peters Structural and Ornamental Iron Works started by doing a range of miscellaneous projects. That early work included making the iron pickets, each individually forged and fabricated by hand, that make up the wrought iron fence around Crown Hill Cemetery. In those years, the company delivered steel to its customers in a horse-drawn wagon.

In the two decades that followed, Geiger & Peters grew steadily, expanding through the 1920s with great success into larger structural projects

in construction and public works. On July 29, 1929, the company incorporated. Its purpose, as its charter said, was "to manufacture, buy, sell, and generally deal in and with structural steel and ornamental iron and material of all kinds, either raw or manufactured, that may be used in structural steel and iron, (and) to contract for the purchase, sale, delivery and erection of steel and iron products ........ "

With the coming of the Great Depression later that year, business suffered, but Peters' confidence in the future did not. As the economy slowed, in 1930 he bought Geiger's interest, turning the story of Geiger & Peters into the story of his family.

Carl Ludwig Peters had been born in 1882 in Soest, Germany. When he was 12 years old, his parents, Joseph and Lisetta, moved with their four children, two sons and two daughters, to the United States. They lived briefly in Kansas and Illinois, before settling in Indianapolis.

Carl completed his formal education in the Indianapolis schools, rejecting a scholarship to study for the priesthood and leaving the classroom at an early age. He began at Roach when he was about 16, starting at the bottom of the ladder and learning all facets of the business. His partner to be was a foreman.

The same year he started his business, Carl married Lena B. Zabel. They had two sons, Oscar and Harold.

A year after taking sole ownership of Geiger & Peters, Carl bought the land at Madison and Minnesota streets where the plant was located. Throughout, he was active in his city, becoming one of the organizers and a director of the Madison Avenue Bank, and a member of the Board of Trade in Indianapolis and a range of business and social organizations.