Hettie M. Dodd was born on February 7, 1850 in Salonica, Turkey, to Reverend Edward M. Dodd and Lydia Babbitt, class of 1848. She graduated from Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1871 and taught at the Western Seminary in Oxford, Ohio. In 1874, she married Reverend Thomas Carter. Her daughters, Annie and Edith, both attended Mount Holyoke College. After the death of her husband in 1894, she moved to Montclair, New Jersey, where she died on October 3, 1943.