Though a Father's Day service was held on July 5, 1908 in West Virginia to honor the fathers killed in the Monongah Mine Disaster, it is Sonora Smart Dodd who is credited as the founder of the official American national holiday.
Smart held her father in great esteem. While hearing a church sermon about the newly recognized Mother's Day at Central Methodist Episcopal Church, Sonora felt strongly that fatherhood needed recognition as well. She approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and suggested her own father's birthday, of June 5, as the day of honor for fathers. The Alliance chose the third Sunday in June instead.
The first Father's Day was celebrated June 19, 1910, in Spokane, Washington. Although observance of the holiday faded in the 1920s over time, the idea of Father's Day became popular and embraced across the nation. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson sent a telegraph to Spokane praising Father's Day services. William Jennings Bryan was another early admirer of the observance. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father's Day. In 1972, President Nixon established a permanent national observance of Father's Day to be held on the 3rd Sunday of June each year.
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