William Clifton Dodd

Born in Marion, Iowa. Dodd graduated from Parsons College in 1883 and McCormick Theological Seminary in 1886. He arrived in Chiang Mai to work under the Laos Mission in 1886. He married Isabella Eakin in 1889. Dodd founded the mission’s training school for evangelists in 1889, and in 1891 the Dodds established the Lamphun Station near Chiang Mai. In 1897, they helped found the Chiang Rai Station, and in 1904 they pioneered the first Laos Mission station outside of Thailand, that at Kengtung, Burma. The latter closed in 1907, and the Dodds returned to Chiang Rai.

An ardent advocate of mission expansion, Dodd took a number of significant exploratory trips into eastern Burma and southern China. He produced a massive literature of reports and correspondence advocating the expansion of Presbyterian mission to reach all of the ethnic Tai peoples. Dodds’ long journey from Chiang Rai through southern China to Canton in 1910 generated considerable interest in Tai missions and led to the Dodds’ founding of the Laos Mission’s Chiangrung (Kiulungkiang) Station in Yunnan, China, in 1917. Dodd died there on 18 Oct 1919. He was one of the first ethnologists of the Tai race and accumulated an impressive array of data on the extent, numbers, and culture of the Tai.