One year after the national celebration of Mother’s Day in the United States, in 1909, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd listened to the tribute speech and thought that fathers also deserved an equal celebration. She came from a family in which she and her five siblings had been cared for by their father, when her mother died giving birth to her last child. Widower William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, dedicated himself to raising his children with the help of his 16-year-old daughter Sonora.