SPOKANE, Wash. — Every third Sunday in June, millions of Americans honor their fathers with cards, cookouts and gifts. But the holiday’s roots stretch back more than a century to a single church pew in Spokane, where a young woman named Sonora Smart Dodd decided fathers deserved a day of their own.
The story begins in 1909 at Spokane’s Central Methodist Episcopal Church. Dodd, pregnant with her first child, sat listening to a Mother’s Day sermon when a question took hold of her.
“Sonora was in church, and was pregnant with her first child and thought long and hard about why aren’t fathers celebrated too?” said Megan Duvall, a historic preservation officer. “And she thought about her own father and what he had sacrificed to bring up all of his children without the benefit of having her mother around.”
Dodd was the oldest of six children. When she was 16, her mother died in childbirth — leaving her father, William Jackson Smart, to raise her and five younger brothers alone.
“Fathers in 1898 when her mother died were not, you know, homemakers. That is not what they did,” Duvall said. “She still had a lot of little brothers that needed to be raised. And so she had nothing but really nice things to say about her father — what a kind and generous man he was.”
After the service, Dodd approached her pastor about creating a day to honor fathers. She launched a petition and, with the support of the Ministerial Association and the YMCA, persuaded many of Spokane’s Protestant pastors to participate. On June 19, 1910, churches across the city held the first Father’s Day celebration.
A plaque at the YMCA on Monroe Street still marks the occasion. “It says this is where Father’s Day was founded in Spokane,” Duvall said.
National recognition, however, took decades. By 1916, the holiday had gained a following, but Dodd stepped away to pursue other interests — enrolling at the Art Institute of Chicago and working as a poet and fashion designer.
In 1930, she returned to the cause with the backing of advertisers eager to sell ties, tobacco and greeting cards. “She had no problem with it becoming kind of a commercial holiday,” Duvall said. “Through that effort, with both the advertising agencies and Sonora, they ended up picking up some steam.”
In 1972, President Richard Nixon officially declared Father’s Day a national holiday. Dodd was 90 years old. She died six years later, but her idea — born in a Spokane church more than 115 years ago — endures every June.
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