Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
McCain’s great-grandfather led Fayetteville parish
U.S. Sen. John Sidney McCain III never attended St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, as far as anyone there can remember, but his great-grandfather’s photo adorns one of its walls.
The 2008 Republican presidential nominee, who died Aug. 25 at age 81, was the great-grandson of the Rev. James Junius Vaulx, the parish’s minister from 1876 until 1902.
In his 1999 book, Faith of My Fathers, McCain noted that his great-grandfather had been an Episcopal clergyman. Those church teachings, he said, had shaped his paternal grandmother, who passed them on to his father.
Born in 1838, Vaulx (rhymes with boss) grew up on his family’s plantation in Jackson, Tenn. He initially studied law at the University of Virginia but, according to a March 5, 1944, Arkansas Gazette Sunday magazine article, he abandoned his studies there after two years, opting to study at Nashota Seminary in Nashota, Wis. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1862, returning South in time to serve with the Confederate forces, according to the Gazette article by his grandson, Edwin Vaulx Boles.
While the battles raged, Vaulx spent his time “ministering to the wounded and dying of both sides,” Boles wrote.
The minister also served congregations in Texas and Tennessee, where he met his wife, before moving to Fayetteville, population 955, according to the 1870 Census.
As the clergyman in charge of an Episcopal parish, Vaulx’s formal title was “rector.”
St. Paul’s wasn’t a coveted post at the time. It was a
small congregation meeting in an unfinished house of worship 60 miles from the nearest rail line.
Vaulx stayed for more than a quarter-century.
When he arrived, “the church was without ceiling (i.e. on walls) and had only a few benches, not more than a dozen,” Vaulx wrote in a brief history of St. Paul’s.
A small box stove provided the heat.
Vaulx and his wife, a British emigrant named Margaret Garside, took at least one son and three daughters with them to Fayetteville. Other births followed. Genealogy websites don’t agree on the total number of offspring. Janice Patterson Boles, the widow of Edwin Vaulx Boles, believes there were 12 or 13 children born, but only nine made it to adulthood.
In Fayetteville, the minister’s “days were full,” and included daily morning and evening prayer services, Vaulx’s grandson wrote. With all those sons and daughters, “he was always assured of some worshipers, as his children attended one service a day.”
Periodically, Vaulx would travel to other towns, often with some of the children in tow. Vaulx held services, among other places, in “Bentonville, Rogers and Siloam Springs with some regularity for a time,” the parish history stated.
He also established a mission in Eureka Springs, 45 miles away. The congregation called itself St. James Episcopal Church, a nod to its founding rector.
During his tenure, the parish in Fayetteville “grew in numbers and became stronger every year,” the church history states.
In 1884, the congregation completed “a handsome, brick edifice, seating about 300 persons,” according to an item in the Gazette.
At a consecration ceremony that April, the parish presented the bishop with the keys to the building amid assurances that the structure was “unencumbered by debt.”
While the congregation flourished, the Vaulx children also thrived.
“They were all educated, they all did good things. They were doers from the beginning,” Janice Boles said.
One of the children, Julia Vaulx, went on to graduate with honors from Arkansas Industrial University (what is now the University of Arkansas) in 1892. She later served as Fayetteville’s first professional university librarian and founded the town’s first public library, serving on its board until her death in 1955.
Another daughter, Katherine Davey Vaulx, eventually had a grandson named John S. McCain III.
By the turn of the century, Fayetteville’s population had surpassed 4,000 people.
But the cold winters, Vaulx said, took a toll on his health.
In 1902, “with deep regret and many tears he left St. Paul’s which he had served so long and loved so well,” according to the parish history.
He headed for southern Florida.
But after seven years in West Palm Beach, he decided he could no longer endure being away from Northwest Arkansas.
In 1909, friends in Fayetteville helped him get a house so he could “spend his declining years among them,” his grandson wrote in 1944.
The preacher remained in the town he loved until his death on Dec. 12, 1913.
The Fayetteville Democrat said Vaulx’s passing was “a distinct loss to the whole town, where everyone called him friend.”
“He served all alike, both black and white, both the poor and the rich. There is no place he will be more missed than in the homes of the lowly,” the newspaper stated.
Vaulx’s widow, Sen. McCain’s great-grandmother, remained in Fayetteville until her death in 1928.
Over the years, Vaulx’s descendants multiplied, spreading across Arkansas and around the country.
His daughter Katherine, born in Fayetteville in 1878, took a job teaching Greek and Latin at the University of Mississippi.
It was there that she met and fell in love with John Sidney “Slew” McCain, a student eight years her junior. They were married in 1909. Her husband went on to serve as a four-star Navy admiral during World War II.
Her son, John Sidney McCain Jr., was a cradle Episcopalian, steeped in the church’s liturgy and its Book of Common Prayer.
In Faith of My Fathers, Sen. McCain said his paternal grandmother, “a well-educated woman of gifted intellect and refined manner,” had “ably seen to her son’s religious instruction, no small feat in a home where the head of the household happily indulged a variety of vices. My father didn’t talk about God or the importance of religious devotion. He didn’t proselytize. But he always kept with him a tattered, dog-eared prayer book, from which he would pray aloud for an hour on his knees, twice every day.”
McCain Jr., like McCain Sr., rose to the rank of fourstar admiral.
During the Vietnam War, he served as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Command.
He continued to do his duty even after his naval fighter pilot son was shot down over Hanoi.
“My mother knew that my father suffered from the burden of commanding a war in a country where his son was imprisoned,” McCain wrote in his memoir. “She told me later of how she would hear him in his study, praying aloud on his knees, beseeching God to ‘show Johnny mercy.’”
Prisoners of war, enduring torture and torment, made “supreme efforts to grasp our faith tightly, to profess it alone, in the dark, and hasten its revival,” McCain wrote.
After one brutal interrogation, “I discovered scratched into one of the cell’s walls the creed ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty,’” McCain recalled. “There, standing witness to God’s presence in a remote, concealed place, recalled to my faith by a stronger, better man, I felt God’s love and care more vividly than I would have felt it had I been safe among a pious congregation in the most magnificent cathedral.”
Early in his life, the future senator spent time with relatives in Arkansas, according to Janice Boles, the widow of Edwin Vaulx Boles, the minister’s grandson.
There’s a photo, she said, of one such visit.
Aware of McCain’s connection to St. Paul’s, the congregation invited the Arizona Republican to speak, Rector Evan Garner said. But time ran out before a visit could be arranged.
St. Paul’s, which struggled to survive before Vaulx arrived, is now the state’s largest Episcopal parish, Garner said.
Its members have not forgotten Vaulx’s faithful service.
Hours after McCain’s life ended, the congregation paused to acknowledge the long-dead preacher and his recently deceased descendant.
“We prayed for John McCain, great-grandson of the Rev. James Junius Vaulx, former rector of this parish,” Garner said. “It is that family connection. We’re praying for one of our own.”