How Religion Shaped the Earliest Father’s Day Celebrations

Often overshadowed by events such as the end of the school year, marked by the gifting of neckties and celebrated with barbecues, Father’s Day would seem to be among the more secular holidays on the calendar.

And yet, the annual observance of Father’s Day on a Sunday, the traditional day of Christian church services, offers a clue to how this day to celebrate dear old dad rose to prominence in the United States from religiously infused origins.

The earliest Father’s Day celebrations in the United States were held in churches after the turn of the 20th century.

The country’s first known Father’s Day celebration was inspired by what has been called the worst mining disaster in American history. On the morning of December 6, 1907, an explosion ripped through two Consolidation Coal Company mines beneath Monongah, West Virginia. The blasts collapsed passageways and destroyed the ventilation system. At least 362 miners were killed, and the death toll might have been even higher due to poor recordkeeping practices and the presence of extra workers who regularly assisted their relatives and neighbors.

Saddened by the immense loss, a local woman named Grace Golden Clayton asked her church to commemorate the fathers, including her own, who died in the disaster and suggested a date close to her father’s birthday. The resulting service was held on July 5, 1908, at Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South (now Central United Methodist Church) in Fairmont, West Virginia. It passed with little fanfare due, in part to recent Independence Day celebrations.

The following year, Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, was attending a Mother’s Day church service when she found herself wondering why fathers weren’t honored in the same way. After all, Dodd’s father had capably handled the difficult task of single-handedly raising her and five younger children following the death of their mother in 1898.

Dodd presented a formal petition for a Father’s Day observance to the Spokane Ministerial Alliance, which agreed to designate June 19, 1910, as the date of observance. On that day, church services throughout Spokane honored fathers. Community members wore honorary roses—red flowers for those with a living father and white ones for those whose fathers had died.

Unlike the lone church service held in West Virginia two years earlier, the larger-scale celebrations in Washington drew significant attention from the press. Former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan was among the luminaries who sent Dodd a congratulatory note.

Before Father’s Day became a national holiday in the United States, countries with a significant Roman Catholic population, including Italy and Spain, were celebrating fathers on March 19, St. Joseph’s Day.

The feast day of St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus Christ, dates to at least the early ninth century. Pope Sixtus IV is credited with adding the feast to the Roman calendar in the late 15th century, and Pope Gregory XV declared it a holy day of obligation in 1621.

Meanwhile, the earliest recorded Father’s Day observances in Europe reportedly took place in the early 16th century. Over time, the dates celebrating contemporary fathers and the venerated biblical father merged in some areas. In Spain, the bridging of the two dates is more of a recent development, as El Día del Padre was formally established as a March 19 holiday in 1948.

Despite Sonora Dodd’s yearslong campaign, Father’s Day failed to capture the American public’s imagination in the same manner as Mother’s Day. Woodrow Wilson, who established Mother’s Day in 1914, remotely participated in Spokane’s Father’s Day in 1916 but neglected to declare an official day of observance. Similarly, President Calvin Coolidge passed on taking executive action despite urging states to mark the occasion in 1924.

Congressional pressure to create a national holiday was mounting by the early 1960s, when Representative Walt Horan of Washington emphasized his state’s role in launching the day then widely, if unofficially, celebrated on the third Sunday in June. Lyndon B. Johnson subsequently issued the first presidential proclamation to recognize this “well-established tradition” in 1966. In 1972, after Congress passed a joint resolution, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation formally designating “one special Sunday in honor of America’s fathers[…]from this year forward” as Father’s Day.