Augusta Merriam was born on August 8, 1863, in Locust Grove, New York, the youngest of four children born to Clinton Levi and Caroline (née Hart) Merriam. Her father had been a mercantilist and banker in Utica and New York City before settling in Locust Grove, shortly before his daughter was born. Between 1871 and 1875, Clinton Merriam served as the United States Congressman from Lewis County, New York, as a member of the Republican Party. Caroline Merriam, meanwhile, was a graduate of Rutgers Female College and the daughter of Levi Hart, a county court judge and New York State Assembly member from Collinsville. Many members of the Merriam family took an interest in the natural sciences. While at Rutgers, Caroline had developed an interest in astronomy, which she shared with her husband and children by allowing them to look at constellations and eclipses through a telescope. Merriam once referred to her paternal aunt, Helen Bagg, as "our family botanist". Her father, meanwhile, developed an interest in nature when, in 1870, he traveled to California on the first transcontinental railroad. Clinton was interested in glaciation as it related to his travels in the Yosemite Valley, and he engaged in a lengthy written correspondence with the naturalist John Muir over this topic. The Merriam family estate, named Homewood, was situated near the Adirondack Mountains, with ample opportunities to explore local wildlife. Merriam would take walks around the estate with her father and older brother, developing her knowledge of the region's species. Her primary interest was in birds, whose habits, songs, and species she learned to identify by watching them from her dining room window. When she was nine years old, Merriam accompanied her father and her older brother, Clinton Hart Merriam, on their camping trip to Florida. C. Hart, as he went by in his adult life, was also interested in the natural sciences, spending his adolescence studying birds and performing taxidermy on the animals he trapped on the family property. Their father's time in Congress gave them connections to the naturalist scene in Washington, D.C.: the elder Merriam was able to arrange a meeting with Spencer Fullerton Baird, then the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, to employ C. Hart as an ornithologist on a Yellowstone expedition in 1872. Most of Merriam's early education was at home, which she described as based in the scientific and natural interests of her