My grandfather on my mother’s side was Arthur McKinley Rainbolt. His marriage to my grandmother, Myrtle Della Hinkle, ended in the early 1950’s; for much of my childhood, I didn’t know whether or not my Grandaddy Rainbolt still existed. My grandparent’s divorce was bitter. It was not a good idea to mention McKinley Rainbolt around my grandmother.
In summer 1972 I turned ten years old and spent a week in Mountain City, Tennessee with my other grandparents, Ben and Fay Wood. I discovered my Grandaddy Rainbolt was still living, and that Granna Fay was acquainted with him, as he lived nearby. I expect I got on her last nerve asking questions. One morning we were picking green beans in the garden and she said, “Okay, let’s go to the house and get cleaned up.” A few minutes later we were driving through the country; eventually we pulled up in front of a small old house, with a small old man standing in front of it. My Granna Fay had brought me to meet my Grandaddy McKinley Rainbolt.
We walked around his farm. He showed me his tobacco barn, and his tool shed. He drove me to a nearby spring where we collected a few gallons of fresh spring water, better to drink than the water from his cistern. He showed me his medals from the Army. He gave me the crossed cannons he wore on his uniform collar when he served in the 49th Artillery Regiment during the First World War.
As it happened, that visit more or less broke the ice. My mother hadn’t spoken to her father in years, but afterwards we visited him on every trip to Tennessee until he passed away in 1989.
McKinley Rainbolt was born in September 1896 in Johnson County, Tennessee. At the time, Grover Cleveland was finishing his second term as President of the United States. A few months earlier, William McKinley, a former governor of Ohio, was nominated by the Republican Party as their candidate for President on the first ballot. William McKinley would go on to win the election in November, 1896, and take office in March 1897. I always figured Grandaddy had been named for President McKinley, and for a previous Republican President, Chester A. Arthur. A lot of East Tennesseans had been Republicans ever since the Civil War, when most East Tennesseans voted not to secede from the Union.
McKinley Rainbolt’s father, John Henry Miller Rainbolt, was a minister. John and Nancy Elizabeth Shupe Rainbolt had five children that survived. John’s brother, Valentine Rainbolt, was married to Nancy’s sister, Mollie. Val and Mollie had a stillborn child sometime around the time McKinley was born. In the 1900 Census, McKinley is listed as living with his parents, but by the 1910 Census, he was living with his Uncle Val and Aunt Mollie. Presumably John and Nancy allowed McKinley to move in with Val and Mollie at some point during his childhood. Val raised McKinley as if he were his own son.
John Rainbolt had a twin sister, Matilda Rainbolt, named after their mother. Less than two weeks after the twins were born in 1864, their father, Sergeant John Henry Rainbolt of Company A, 13th East Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry had died of measles in the military hospital at Gallatin, Tennessee. The 13th Cavalry was a Union Army unit, made up mostly of East Tennesseans who had opposed secession.
Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as U.S. President on March 4, 1913. When the First World War broke out in Europe in July 1914, Wilson promised to keep America out of the war. Even after the USS Lusitania was sunk on May 7, 1915, the United States remained neutral.
McKinley Rainbolt enlisted in the U.S. Army on November 22, 1916, when he was twenty years old. He was sent to Fort Williams, on a cape southeast of Portland, Maine, and assigned to the 49th Artillery Regiment.
Germany had formally agreed to respect U.S. neutrality, but in January 1917, British intelligence intercepted a message from the German Foreign Office offering financial support and territory if the Mexican government were to attack the United States, and passed the infamous “Zimmerman Telegram” on to President Wilson:
“We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal or alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.” Signed, ZIMMERMANN.
As planned, the German Navy resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and more American ships were sunk. The United States declared war on Germany on April 16, 1917.
Prior to the war, the United States Army had been reduced in size to about 100,000 active-duty soldiers. Most of those served in Cavalry or Coast Artillery units. Cavalry units were highly mobile, and could be deployed anywhere; they were trained to fight on horseback or on foot as infantry if needed, so were flexible. Coast Artillery units were trained to protect the thousands of miles of U.S. coastline with heavy guns against attacks by hostile navies or seaborne invaders, and were usually based in massive concrete forts overlooking the ocean. One was at Fort Williams, where my Grandaddy was stationed.
In Europe in 1917, British and French forces were bogged down in trench warfare against the Germans, and asked their new American allies to send mobile heavy artillery units. However, due to the isolationist policies of the previous decades, the U.S. had no mobile heavy artillery to send. They had invested in massive, fixed coastal guns instead. U.S. manufacturers began production was begun on large mobile artillery pieces, but none would be ready to deploy before the war ended. The U.S. Army did, however, have Coast Artillery soldiers, who could be retrained to operate the British and French mobile heavy artillery pieces.
Shortly after war was declared, U.S. Coast Artillery units began reorganizing and training for their new mission. In June 1917, the 49th Artillery Regiment was redesignated as the 3rd Company, Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Williams. That month, Brigadier General George T. Bartlett was ordered to form an artillery brigade composed of three regiments that could be trained to operate 10-inch railway guns against the Germans. On July 6, 1917, artillery officers from around the United States began assembling at Fort Adams, near Newport, Rhode Island, to organize the 6th, 7th, and 8th Provisional Regiments. The first men to be assigned to these regiments were those serving in the existing Coast Artillery units around the country.
As part of this organization, the men of 3rd Company, C.A.C. from Fort Williams travelled to Fort Adams to form Battery G of the 6th Provisional Coast Artillery Regiment. Due to an outbreak of diptheria in Newport, the troops were confined to Fort Adams, so McKinley Rainbolt didn’t get to see much of Rhode Island.
On Sunday, August 12, 1917, the 6th Regiment assembled at the Polo Grounds in Newport, then marched down Broadway Avenue to the Washington Square Station, where they boarded a train bound for New York. 108 officers and 1745 enlisted men travelled to Pier 54, on the west side of Manhattan, across from Hoboken, New Jersey. Pier 54 was part of the Cunard Line docks. There, on August 13, they boarded the RMS Andania, a British transport ship that had been built in 1913 (so it was still fairly new).
Arthur McKinley Rainbolt appears on the August 14 passenger manifest as a Private in Battery G of the 6th Regiment. His father, John M. Rainbolt of R.F.D. 3 in Butler, Tennessee, is listed as his next of kin. McKinley was surprised to find his brother, Dewey Rainbolt, on the same ship; Dewey served in Battery M of the 6th Regiment, and had been stationed at Fort Andrews, Massachusetts. (For some reason, Dewey listed their father’s address as R.F.D. 6 in Butler.)
The passenger manifests were laboriously typewritten, listing hundreds of names. Along with the artillerymen of the 6th Regiment, a detachment of eight female nurses from “Havard” – spelled here as it was on the manifest – boarded the Andania, escorted by their “matron”. The typist appears to have typed the name of the university the way it was pronounced to him: “Havard”. Another passenger was Captain Joseph DeMoss McCain. Captain McCain’s father, Major General Henry P. McCain, was an uncle of John Sidney McCain III, who would be made a prisoner of war in Vietnam and later be elected U.S. Senator from Arizona.
When the ship sailed, the men were confined below decks, in hopes that German spies might not recognize the Andania was transporting troops. Under way, they had to observe security precautions – they were discouraged from making too much noise, and not allowed to smoke on deck after dark, in an effort to avoid detection by enemy submarines.
The Andania sailed to a point off Halifax, Nova Scotia, where it remained until a rendezvous on August 21 with other transport ships that would convoy across to the UK under the protection of a destroyer. The ships in the convoy were the Cedric, Lapland, Justica, Tunican, Andania, Aurania, and the Orlanza.
On August 29, the convoy reached the “Danger Zone” – an area off the coast of the United Kingdom where enemy activity had been reported. On the night of August 31, the ships sailed into Bantry Bay, on the southwest coast of Ireland, to take cover from German submarines operating in the area. The next day, the convoy got back under way, and arrived at Liverpool on September 2, 1917.
Disembarking, the men boarded train cars for transport to Borden, an English village where they would train for a couple of weeks before proceeding to France. McKinley spent his twenty-first birthday in Borden. One can only wonder if the handful of British coins he brought back that I have in my possession were souvenirs of that birthday.
On September 17, 1917 the men were transported by train to Southampton, where they boarded transports that took them to Le Havre, France. From Le Havre, they travelled by train to a town about sixty miles east of Paris called Mailly de Camp, where there is still a French military installation today. The artillery training grounds east of Mailly can be easily recognized using “Google Earth” – you can even see tank tracks across the fields in the satellite imagery. The men had their first payday in France on September 27, 1917 at Mailly. Some of the barracks still in use appear to have survived from the First World War; they were probably used by the Germans during the Second World War, then used by the French Army since then.
Private McKinley Rainbolt spent the winter of 1917 in France. He brought back a few worn French coins. His unit would have spent time training in Mailly and operating heavy field guns with the French Army near the front lines, through the winter and into the spring of 1918.
Somewhere along the line, the 6th Regiment C.A.C. was reorganized again, this time as the 51st Artillery Regiment. McKinley Rainbolt’s Battery G was redesignated Battery F of the 3rd Battalion, 51st Artillery Regiment. From April 22 until September 11, the 3rd Battalion was assigned to the Verdun Sector of operations.
The Aurania’s security precautions did not save the ship from an attack by a German submarine later that winter. On January 27, 1918, U-46, commanded by Oberleutnant Leo Hillebrand, sank the Aurania halfway between Rathlin Island, off the Northern Ireland coast, and the Mull of Kintyre on the west coast of Scotland. The wreck is still there, resting upright on the seafloor about 360 feet below the surface. Seven sailors were killed in the attack.
The Germans broke through the Allied defenses near St. Mihiel, seventy miles northeast of Mailly. In response, U.S. forces launched an attack on the St. Mihiel Salient on September 12, 1918 towards the city of Metz, which was being used as a German supply and transportation hub.
McKinley Rainbolt probably spent his twenty-second birthday helping move the big eight inch guns and artillery shells into position, preparing for the attack on the St. Mihiel Salient. They were unable to take Metz back from the Germans, due to heavy rains, but this first attack by exclusively U.S. forces during the war was considered to be an American victory.
The artillerymen of the 51st participated in the St. Mihiel attack, then marched for ten days back to the Verdun Sector, much of it on muddy roads, to get in place for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The logistical plan to move the men from St. Mihiel back to the Verdun Sector was put together by Colonel George C. Marshall. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive great battle would last between September 26 and November 11, 1918 and turned out to be the final Allied campaign of the war.
The front was twenty-four miles wide, stretching from the Argonne Forest in the West to the Meuse River in the East. The attack began with a three-hour barrage by 2,766 artillery guns, along the entire length of the line. During those three hours, the U.S. gunners fired more artillery rounds than both sides shot during the entire American Civil War. Captain Harry S. Truman, the future U.S. President, was in command of another artillery battery a few miles away. Truman said he and his men were made “deaf as a post from the noise” of the bombardment.
The 3rd Battalion of the 51st Artillery Regiment was assigned to support III Corps of the U.S. First Army, commanded by General “Blackjack” Pershing during the Offensive.
The “Lost Battalion” was trapped nearby in a part of the Argonne Forest about 22 miles northwest of Verdun, and relieved on October 6 as the larger battle raged.
Less than a mile north of Chatel Chehery, a corporal from another part of Tennessee named Alvin York would kill fifteen enemy soldiers, disable thirty-five machine gun emplacements, and with the handful of men in his squad capture 132 German prisoners, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor.
During the battle, on October 16, command of the First Army was reassigned to Lt. General Hunter Liggett. III Corps, part of the First Army, was commanded by General Robert Lee Bullard.
On October 21 troops from III Corps overran a part of the Hindenburg Line that was considered to be one of the most heavily fortified sections of German defenses, just south of Landres de St Georges, France. General Bullard wrote the following description:
“The way out is forward, through the Kriemhilde Stellung, eastern section of the Hindenburg Line…. Not a line, a net, four kilometers deep. Wire, interlaced, knee-high, in grass. Wire, tangled devilishly in forests…. Pill boxes, in succession, one covering another. No ‘fox hole’ cover for gunners here, but concrete, masonry. Bits of trenches. More wire. A few light guns…. Defense in depth. Eventually, the main trenches. Many of them, in baffling irregularity, so that the attacker cannot know when he has mopped up…. Farther back, again defense in depth, a wide band of artillery emplacements.”
In the fighting leading up to the breaching of the Kriemhilde Stellung, General Douglas McArthur was gassed twice by the Germans while leading his infantry brigade. Somewhere nearby in the battle, a young officer named George S. Patton was commanding one of the first U.S. Army tanks ever built.
Private McKinley Rainbolt’s battery operated in close proximity to these events, just behind that twenty-four-mile front. They would have been conducting “indirect fire” – at targets anywhere from one to ten miles away. As the Americans shelled the Germans, the Germans were lobbing shells right back.
It took forty-seven days for the U.S. troops to cover thirty-four miles. The fighting was brutal. 53,402 Americans were killed in combat during the First World War. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive was one of the costliest battles in U.S. military history: 26,277 American soldiers were killed and almost 96,000 were wounded during this climactic battle.
The last salvo by the 51st Artillery Regiment was fired just two minutes before the war ended. The regiment turned in their heavy equipment to the Ordinance Department after the Armistice, and left Brest, France to return to the states on January 26, 1919. The 51st arrived back at New York on February 3, 1919 on the USS Agamemnon. The Regular Army men were temporarily assigned to Fort Hamilton, New York; the rest (reservists and National Guardsmen) were discharged.
When he returned to the U.S., McKinley Rainbolt had more than a year remaining on his enlistment. While many of the men of the 51st were assigned to the 39th Artillery Brigade at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, McKinley Rainbolt is listed in the 1920 Census as living in Camp Lewis, Washington, so it can be presumed he finished out his service there – assigned to another Coast Artillery unit.
Unknown to McKinley Rainbolt, President Wilson exhausted himself in negotiations after the Armistice. On October 2, 1919, the President suffered a stroke. His wife, Edith Bolling Wilson, concealed the extent of his illness and essentially ran the country in his stead until his second term ended in March 1921.
McKinley Rainbolt was discharged from the Army on August 26, 1920 and returned to Butler, Tennessee, where he married my grandmother, Myrtle Della Hinkle, five and a half months later. He had a small farm where he raised tobacco.
In the 1940 Census, McKinley was listed as Head of Household. The family would have still been living in what had been Uncle Val’s house. The foundations of that house are still visible when the waters of the Watauga Lake are low, across from the current location of the town of Butler.
In June 1942 the Tennessee Valley Authority opened a Readjustment Case File on the Rainbolts. This was likely the first notice McKinley had that Val’s old house would one day be inundated by the waters of the lake that would be created when the Watauga River was dammed.
On October 1942, forty-six-year-old McKinley Rainbolt reenlisted in the U.S. Army. He served as a truck driver on the Alaska Highway for just a few months, and was discharged on September 8, 1943 – just before he turned 47. He worked between Dawson Creek and Fairbanks.
In 1945, McKinley built a brick house on 137 acres of land. Now, the address of the house he built is listed as 187 Piercetown Road, Butler, but in the 1950 Census, it was listed as being on McQueen Street. In 2025, the current McQueen Street is perpendicular to Piercetown Road, and runs past Butler Baptist Church, which sits on the corner. If you stand in front of the church and face the house, there is an old road bed to the left of the house. It appears that at one time, McQueen Street continued across Piercetown Road, right on down to Rainbolt Street, which begins next to what used to be Grindstaff’s Sinclair Station.
Sometime in the early 1950’s, McKinley and Myrtle’s marriage ended in a bitter divorce. In December 1956, at age sixty, McKinley married a woman named Mavis Proffitt, age thirty-four. My grandmother, Myrtle, got the house on Piercetown Road. Eventually my parents moved into that house with Myrtle; they were living there when my sister was born and later when I was born.
Myrtle Rainbolt, who we called Nana, passed away in a nursing home in Martinsville, Virginia in December 1974. She had lived with us at the Trinity Baptist Church Parsonage in Snow Creek until she became too frail a couple of years before she passed. She is buried in the cemetery, up the hill from the Butler Baptist Church and the house on Piercetown Road.
When I took Dixie to meet my Grandaddy Rainbolt in the late 1980’s, we were sitting at the dining table in their house at Cobb Creek when his wife Mavis pointed at me and asked Dixie, “Do ya love him?” Mavis had a nasally voice. Dixie was taken aback but managed to say, “Yes, I do love him.” Mavis replied, “Well, you’ll get over it.” Mavis was good to my Grandaddy; he lived to be ninety-two years old.
That day Grandaddy Rainbolt gave Dixie and me a first-hand account of the ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ when the First World War ended. He said the guns fired back and forth all morning, until they were told to cease fire. A few minutes later, he said, they were told the war was over. He and some of his comrades climbed to the top of their fortifications, and could see the Germans standing across the lines on top of theirs. Soldiers from the two sides waved their hats at each other.
McKinley Rainbolt passed away in January 1989 and is buried in the Butler Cemetery – on the opposite side of the hill from Myrtle Rainbolt, near his parents and his Uncle Val and Aunt Mollie.
SOURCES
https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~cacunithistories/military/Provisional_Regiments_CAC.html
https://linerwrecks.com/cunard/wrecks/andania_1.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/macarthur-ww1-cote-de-chatillon