William J. Dodd - Early Years

Early Years

William J. Dodd was born in Quebec City, Canada, in 1862, the son of Irish and English parents. Before emigrating from Canada to the United States and Chicago Illinois, William's English/Scots father, Edward, was a wharfinger and his Irish mother, Mary Dinning, a school teacher. The family of six, Edward Sr., Mary, Jane (Jenny), Elizabeth, Edward Jr., and William James, moved to Chicago in late 1869. The great Chicago fire of 1871 originated just east and south of where the Dodds had their first address (Ward 10) in Chicago.

Dodd received his training in the architectural office of William Le Baron Jenney though the time of this apprenticeship is not yet established. His first employment appears to be for the Pullman Car Company as a draftsman of architect Solon Spencer Beman's designs for the planned city of Pullman, Illinois from 1880 through 1883. Dodd's social life in Pullman was marked with athletic participation on the first Pullman competitive rowing crew. As a member of the Pullman Rowing Club and the Pullman Pleasure Club he was often mentioned in the press accounts of fetes and dance parties that he coordinated for the young elites of Pullman and Hyde Park. This sporting sociability is not merely incidental to Dodd but returns as an important feature of his later life in Louisville, with his membership in the Pendennis Club and Louisville Country Club, and in Los Angeles with his founding of the Uplifters Club, an offshoot of the Los Angeles Athletic Club.

In 1889 William J. Dodd married Ione Estes of Memphis, TN. Ione was from a large family of some political and historical importance in post-Reconstruction era Tennessee and in the Upland South region. While Dodd's religious upbringing was Methodism, after his marriage to Ione his denominational practice was Presbyterianism. The marriage produced no surviving children.

There are some uncertainties in Dodd's biography. Although naturalized in 1869 upon entering the United States, from the 1890s onward Dodd claimed to be Chicago-born, doing so, Jay Gatsby-like, in all kinds of public documents. In 1897, in an interview with a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal W. J. Dodd left the reporter and, thus, posterity with the impression that he was a native Chicagoan, that he graduated from "the Chicago schools" and had been in the first graduating class of the Chicago Art Institute. The archives of the Institute do not yet support this claim. Similarly unclear is when, in what year, Dodd began his professional practice in Louisville. The year usually offered in the histories of Kentucky architects (from Withey to Hedgepeth to Kleber to Luhan, Domer and Mohney) for Dodd's arrival in Louisville is 1884, based on the forementioned 1897 article in the Louisville Courier-Journal. In contrast, Chicago newspapers place him still in Pullman by early 1884, thereafter taking employment as an architect with the Northern Pacific Railway upon recommendation by S.S. Beman and moving to the rail company's office in Portland Oregon only to return to Chicago (Hyde Park) and employment with the Beman brothers (S.S. and W.I) by the end of 1885 after the Northern Pacific's collapse and reorganization. The journal Inland Architect announces Dodd's imminent departure from Chicago to begin a partnership with O. C. Wehle of Louisville in mid-1886 saying: "Mr Dodd will be a valuable addition to the architects of Louisville". In mid November 1886, Dodd was elected to membership in The Western Association of Architects, his home city being given as Louisville. Dodd first appears as a resident, a boarder, in Louisville in the 1887 Caron's Louisville Directory. The American Institute of Architects online historical database of its members states that Dodd became a member of the A.I.A. in 1916 despite evidence that he was listed in membership with the Louisville Chapter of the A.I.A. in 1912 and in its Southern California chapter in 1915.