A Man for All Seasons
- Clayton Trutor
- 9 hours ago
- 9 min read
STORY BY CLAYTON TRUTOR PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY JOHN PRICE CAREY
Benson, Vermont’s Graham Carey was a Philosopher, a Farmer, an Artisan, an Architect, and an Astor. He was also the first American to be awarded the Croix de Guerre, France’s Highest Military Honor.
Graham Carey believed strongly in putting ideas into practice. The longtime Benson resident led a unique Twentieth Century life. He was born into one of the country’s most storied families. His convictions brought him to the battlefields of Europe. A change of heart brought him to a town of fewer than 600 residents in Rutland County, Vermont. There, he put into practice many of the things he had learned far from the Green Mountain State, while also pursuing many new interests. Graham aspired to serve his community and his world in practical ways while employing means that helped make places and spaces both near and far more beautiful.

Arthur Graham Carey was born in Boston in 1892, the second of Arthur Astor Carey and Agnes (Whiteside) Carey’s four children. Graham grew up in the Boston area and lived in privileged circumstances.
His great-great grandfather was John Jacob Astor, who was widely regarded as the wealthiest man in America at the time of his death in 1848. Astor made his fortune in the fur trade and the real estate business in his adopted home of New York City. He was a patron of the arts and bequeathed the money which helped establish the New York Public Library. Graham followed in his famous ancestor’s footsteps, supporting the artistic endeavors of many of the finest artists and craftspeople of his era. His own father, Arthur Astor Carey, helped establish the Society of Arts and Crafts of Boston, which spurred the Arts + Crafts movement in the United States.
Despite Graham’s privileged background, his son John Price Carey notes that his father “did not like the trappings of wealth, and in his own way lived very simply. These feelings had a lot to do with his love of working with his hands, and with his attraction to the farming life.”
“My grandfather collected interests,” said David Fedor-Cunningham, who grew up next door to his grandfather and maintained a close relationship with him. “He was a Renaissance man. He was always studying, always reading, always creating. He picked up interests and pursued them. So much of it emerged from his religious beliefs.”
Unlike most turn-of-the-century American elites, Graham was a Catholic. His mother came from the rare English family that had remained in the Catholic Church in spite of the Reformation. Agnes raised her children to be devout Catholics, a practice that shaped Graham’s life and work.
Graham attended Harvard and studied architecture. He graduated in June 1914, just months before the “Guns of August” commenced the First World War.
Graham and many of his Harvard classmates supported the Allies in their resistance to German aggression. Carey and some fellow Harvard students put their beliefs into action and joined the cause.
Graham volunteered for the French Ambulance Service for three years, risking his life to bring wounded French soldiers to safety. Initially, Graham served in Alsace, before later working in Macedonia. He and fellow driver Dudley Hale were the first Americans to be awarded the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest military honor. Later, Carey received a second Croix de Guerre, honoring his bravery in the face of unspeakable danger. When the United States entered World War I, Graham was transferred to the U.S. Army’s 76th Field Artillery and was commissioned as a Lieutenant.
After returning from Europe, Graham made the acquaintance of Elisabeth Foster Millet, an esteemed Boston debutante who had attended boarding school in Europe.
“She was so popular that she needed to thin out her suitors,” David explains. Elisabeth was an excellent tree climber and decided to place her date book in a small box at the top of a European Beech tree. Potential suitors had to climb the tree to sign her book. Graham not only climbed the tree to ask for a meeting. He wrote her a poem, as well.
They were soon married and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Graham and Elisabeth Carey had three children: Joan, Hilda, and Christopher.
Graham worked for the Boston architectural firm of Bigelow & Wadsworth while pursuing a wide range of other intellectual and aesthetic passions. He taught for a time at Harvard but found his firmest intellectual foundations in the world of Catholic art and aesthetics.
“He wrote and lectured extensively with a view to communicating his advocacy of a return to a more traditional, spiritual approach to art,” John said. Graham was a prominent member of the Catholic Art Association. He contributed regularly to its journal, Catholic Art Quarterly, and served as its editor. Carey lectured widely on the philosophy of art and craft during his tenure with Catholic Art Quarterly.
In 1938, Carey addressed a crowd of 300 at St. Michael’s College, speaking on the subject of medieval craftsmanship. Carey had recently completed a book entitled What We Mean by Craftsmanship, a study of the history of the field with guidance for practical applications of its methods in the modern day.
“He believed that art has declined in modern times, because it was no longer rooted in religious and philosophical principles,” John said. Graham admired medieval artisans for the fullness of their knowledge of their tools and their means of production. He abhorred the modern tendency to separate decorative things from functional things. He preferred the notion that useful things could be beautiful, as well. This became a hallmark of Graham’s life and work.
He took up woodcarving, in addition to silver and goldsmithing. He became a partner in the John Stevens Shop, one of the nation’s oldest surviving firms. Founded in Newport, Rhode Island in 1705, the John Stevens Shop specializes in handcrafted stone inscriptions.
The Carey family’s relocation to Vermont took place during the early days of America’s involvement in World War II. His wife was seriously ill, and he believed a change of location and lifestyle would benefit them in an increasingly turbulent world.
“He was a pioneer in the ‘Back to the Land’ Movement. His experience in World War I had had a profound impact on him,” his grandson David Fedor-Cunningham shares.
Graham moved his family to Benson in 1942 and started Sunrise Farm, a dairy farm where he raised Brown Swiss and Jersey cows. Graham and his daughter, Joan, studied the biodynamic methods of agriculture developed by Rudolf Steiner as part of their preparation for dairy farming. Joan and her husband, Michael, established Trinity Farm in the late 1940s on adjacent property, where they raised Jersey cows. Trinity Farm is still in existence as an organic hay farm.
“Benson didn’t necessarily roll out the red carpet,” David said. Graham’s countercultural sensibilities did not jibe with the deeply conservative sensibilities of Benson, an isolated community rooted in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage of most of its residents.
Not long after arriving in Benson, Graham spoke with a local farmer, who enumerated the community’s virtues. Foremost among them, according to the farmer, was that there were no Catholics in town.

During the war, a Benson neighbor poking around in the Carey house came upon Graham’s World War I uniform in the closet. The neighbor decided that this was a German Army uniform and Graham was a German spy. Said neighbor contacted federal authorities, who came to Graham’s home to check him out. In later years, Graham laughed it off, but understandably regarded the episode as upsetting.
Graham tried to lure people of similar sensibilities to Benson. He longed to create a community of like-minded, liberal Catholic artists. He tried to start a school and build a hydroelectric dam on his property. None of this came to fruition. The Careys counted among their friends the Von Trapp family of The Sound of Music fame and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, known for its pacifism and social activism.
“My father originally hoped that Sunrise Farm would develop into a self-sufficient community of craftspeople,” said John.
Instead, Graham turned his communal interests towards building a church for Catholics in Benson, a place he regarded as both beautiful and practical.
In 1954, Graham estimated that 60 Catholics resided in Benson and had to travel to another town for Mass. Graham called upon his neighbors to help in the project, Catholic and Protestant alike, to work together to build a new church in their community. Dozens of Bensonites volunteered their time to build the church, which Carey designed and engineered. He received approval for the project from Catholic Bishop Edward Ryan and named the church Christ Sun of Justice.
The Church was built on Sunrise Farm on a knoll overlooking the Hubbardton River. It is located roughly a mile back from 22A, the main roadway that passes through Benson.
The story of Christ Sun of Justice exemplifies the willingness that Vermonters show time and again to help their neighbors. Construction commenced in 1951 after that year’s harvest. Carey and some townspeople drew logs from the nearby forest for use in the building of the church. In 1952, they laid the foundation. During 1953 and 1954, the volunteers worked on the exterior of the church, which was built in the shape of a cross.
The interior of the church incorporated work by some of Graham’s favorite artisans. English sculptor Peter Watts completed carvings around the east door. The church’s-stained glass was designed by German artist Clement Scmidt and made by Carl Paulsen, an artisan from Massachusetts.
The church contains a sliver of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. It makes use of local stone—the body of the church was made with marble while the roof was made from slate. A bell placed over the altar was a Carey family heirloom, made originally for a church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the summer home of Graham’s parents. A high pyramidal tower stands directly over the altar. A sundial was built into the church’s south wall. The twelve cornerstones of the church bear inscriptions of the names of the twelve apostles.
“I’m a Catholic and interested in design and building. I wanted to build a church that would be perfect for the country,” Graham told the Rutland Herald in 1954.
John describes Christ Sun of Justice Church as the “ultimate expression of Graham’s artistic ideas.”
Carey said as much in the 1954 Rutland Herald story, though he gave most of the credit to the townspeople who volunteered their time to help build it. In the article, Carey made sure to credit by name the dozens of town residents of all religious convictions who helped him build the church.
Christ Sun of Justice is just one of three privately held Catholic Churches in the world and it is overseen by a small non-profit trust. For many years, a priest from the neighboring town of Orwell came to the church during the summertime to say weekly masses. It still hosts the occasional commemorative mass, and it is used periodically for weddings, baptisms, funerals, and impromptu children’s plays put on by Graham’s descendants.
After a long illness, Elisabeth Millet Carey died in March 1955 at age 65. The first service held at Christ Sun of Justice Church was her funeral mass. She was buried on the southeast side of the church in what became the family burial plot. Many of the men and women who contributed their labor to the construction of the church attended the service.
Carey sold Sunrise Farm shortly after his wife’s death and moved to Newport, Rhode Island. In 1956, Graham married Nancy Price, a partner at the John Stevens Shop. The couple had two children, John and Felicity.
Nancy was raised in Newport, Rhode Island and attended the Rhode Island School of Design. She started at the John Stevens Shop as an inscription carver in 1945 but soon became a partner in the firm. Nancy was also known for her skills as a calligrapher and photographer.
“She always put people first, especially her children,” her son John said.
The family resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts for most of the year, but they spent their summers in Benson. In 1969, they returned to Benson full-time, settling in a home that Graham built.
“When I was young, there seemed to be no end to all of the wonderful and fascinating things that he could tell me,” John said of his father. “He had wide and scholarly interests and always encouraged my own curiosity.”
Carey tutored his children in Latin and Greek. The family’s bookshelves were filled with poetry and literature, as well as books on art, architecture, agriculture, history, and theology. He was deeply committed to rural life as well, coming to the aid of his neighbors in their times of need.
His son and grandson both note his remarkable vigor for his age. Graham was 65 when his son, John, was born.
“He was a very loving person. He had so many diverse interests. I latched onto the ones that we shared, or what he cultivated in me,” said David, who grew up at Trinity Farm. Most days, David walked through the woods to his grandparents’ home and spent time with them gardening, tending to trees, and listening to their stories. David and his grandfather shared a passion for homing pigeons and watched them venture between their family’s properties.
In later years, Graham and his family became active in the organic farming movement. Graham took up the cause of keeping nuclear power out of the Lake Champlain region, forming a group called Vermonters Against Splitting Atoms.

Despite his immense gifts, Graham remained a humble and thoughtful man to the end. “When my grandfather was dying, he saw me and interacted with me, as if I was a fellow officer in World War I. His focus was on the treatment of the enlisted. He had a lot of compassion for them,” David recalls. His grandfather spoke of the fears the soldiers faced in the midst of the horrors they experienced.
Graham Carey died in 1984 at age 92. His second wife, Nancy, lived for many more years, residing in Benson until 2019. She died in Middlebury, Vermont, in 2024, several months after her 100th birthday.
Christ Sun of Justice stands as a testament to the work that Graham, his family, and his community did together all those years ago. They made something useful and beautiful that remains in Benson.