According to an article I just read in the Seattle Times (unfortunately more of the typical backhanded praise of fathers), it was a Spokane, Washington woman who came up with the idea for Fathers’ Day. Interested, I decided to do a bit of research, and found a rather touching story behind the holiday.

In 1909 Sonora Smart Dodd, who lived in Spokane at the time, was annoyed at the common portrayal of fathers as lazy, good-for-nothing ne’er-do-wells. This hardly squared with what she knew of her own father, who had raised six children by himself after his wife died in childbirth.

Sonora’s father, William Jackson Smart, was born in Arkansas in 1842. Raised on a farm, he joined the Grand Army of the Republic during the Civil War and served as a gunner in the Arkansas 1st Battery Light Artillery. After the war, he married his first wife, Elizabeth Harris, who died at only 30 in 1878. Two years later, he married again (to Ellen Victoria Cheek Billingsley) and eventually moved to Washington state in 1887 to farm near Spokane.

In 1898, his second wife died while giving birth at the advanced maternal age of 47. 56 years old at the time, Mr. Smart was left alone with an infant and five children (his children from his first wife were already grown at the time). Sonora, about 16, was the oldest child still in the house, and the only girl. She and her father raised the boys together, and she grew to have a great appreciation and love for her father as he held things together through those difficult years.

Years later, when Sonora was a grown woman with a husband and son of her own, she came up with the idea for Fathers’ Day after hearing a Mothers’ Day sermon. She proposed the celebration to a church group in Spokane, choosing a June date, because her father’s birthday was in June. The pastors liked the idea, and on June 19, 1910 Spokane held the first Father’s Day celebration.

Soon, the celebration gained traction across the nation, and within a few short years it became a tradition. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson came to Spokane in person to deliver a speech on Father’s day, and 50 years later President Lyndon Johnson made the holiday official.

After a brief illness, William Jackson Smart died in Spokane in 1919. All nine of his children were at his side.