Happy Father's Day ~ First Father's Day was Celebrated in West Virginia

The first modern celebration of a "Father's Day" was held on July 5, 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, in the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South, now known as Central United Methodist Church. Grace Golden Clayton chose the Sunday nearest to the birthday of her father, Methodist minister Fletcher Golden. The city was overwhelmed by other events and the celebration was never promoted outside of the town itself and no proclamation was made in the City Council. Two events overshadowed this event: the celebration of Independence Day in 4 July, with 12,000 attendants and several shows including a hot air balloon event, which took over the headlines in the following days, and the death of a 16 year old girl on 4 July, that became known on 5 July. The local church and Council were overwhelmed and they didn't even think of promoting the event, and it wasn't celebrated again for many years. The original sermon was not reproduced in press and it was lost. Additionally, Clayton was a quiet person, who never promoted the event or even talked to other persons about it.


Clayton was mourning the loss of her father, and on December of that year the Monongah Mining Disaster in nearby Monongah killed 361 men, 250 of them fathers, leaving around a thousand fatherless children. Clayton suggested her pastor Robert Thomas Webb to honor all those fathers.


Clayton also might have been inspired by Anna Jarvis' crusade to establish Mother's Day; two months prior, Jarvis had held a celebration for her dead mother in Grafton, West Virginia, a town about 15 miles away from Fairmont.

Angela