The Origin of Father’s Day

Many people assume Father’s Day (and Mother’s Day for that matter) is a holiday designed by greeting card makers to turn a profit. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The story behind how this day became a holiday is actually a tale of determination by one woman and  a decades-long fight to get fathers the recognition they deserve.

Words - Tishaniya Seneviratne

Some attribute the first Father’s Day observance to the 1907 Monongah, West Virginia mining disaster that killed 361 men—250 of them fathers— and which left more than a thousand children without a dad. Grace Golden Clayton, whose father was killed in the tragedy, suggested a service of commemoration to the pastor of her local Methodist chapel. But it never really caught on as an annual observance. Two years later, in May of 1909, a woman named Sonora Louise Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, heard a Mother’s Day sermon by Reverend Dr. Henry Rasmussen in her hometown church and thought a similar day should be set aside to honor fathers. Her own father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, raised six children as a single parent.

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