Happy Father's Day!

[David Lockmiller]

I thought there might be those interested in reading this story with some relation to the Civil War.

The Civil War veteran and single dad who inspired Father’s Day
By Gillian Brockell
June 20, 2021 at 4:00 a.m. PDT

The story begins as follows:

The sermon that morning must have stung a bit. Sonora Smart Dodd sat in the pews of Central Methodist Episcopal Church in Spokane, Wash., on May 9, 1909, as her pastor extolled the virtues of mothers. Mother’s Day had only been invented the year before in Grafton, W.Va., but it had already spread across the nation.

Dodd’s mother had died in childbirth 11 years before, when Dodd was a teenager. Now pregnant herself, perhaps the sermon brought up difficult emotions.

Afterward, she later recounted, she approached the pastor and told him, maybe with a little defensiveness, “I liked everything you said about motherhood, but don’t you think father should have a special day, too?”

William Jackson Smart was a farmer, an Arkansas native who had fought for the Union during the Civil War. He and his wife Ellen had moved West when Sonora was a child, and they continued growing their family. When she died in 1898, she left William with six kids, ranging in age from 16 to a newborn.

In a 1964 interview, she said her dad assumed both the father and mother roles. “This role he performed with courage and selflessness until we were all in homes of our own,” she said, according to the Spokesman-Review.

What may have been a passing thought for some, Dodd soon turned into reality. She circulated a petition around town and then got the support of the local YMCA and the Spokane Ministerial Association. On June 19, 1910, the Protestant churches of Spokane observed their first Father’s Day. There were fatherhood-themed sermons, and churches awarded bouquets to men who were the oldest men in the congregation, or the father with the most children, or with the youngest child.

[Note: I have not read any more of the story at this point. But I would like to say this: The father achieved a lot in his lifetime with courage and fortitude.]