His parents immigrated from England to the east coast of the United States in the 1860s.

James Fox remarried several years later, but this marriage did not last, and the father and son moved to California in 1886 to work on a ranch in Carmel Valley.

They returned to the east coast a short time later and worked in the steel mills and potteries in New Jersey.

After graduation, he attended the General Theological Seminary in New York, and was ordained deacon by Bishop Thomas A. Starkey of Newark in 1900, and priest in December 1900 by Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington of Central New York.

[2] Fox served as missionary-in-charge of Slaterville Springs, Speedsville, and Dryden in New York between 1900 and 1901.