family members. Her first formal education took place in Syracuse, New York, where Merriam was sent for medical treatment due to general ill health. She lived with her physician's family for a year and attended the local public school there. After that experience, Merriam attended school in New York City, where her family spent the winters, and at Mrs. Piatt's private school in Utica. College and early activism At the insistence of her older brothers, Merriam enrolled in 1882 at the newly-founded Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The poor health that had beleaguered her throughout her childhood and prevented her from much formal education meant that she could only enroll as a special student. This prevented her from the advanced study of liberal arts, but also allowed her to take courses in which she was personally interested rather than following a prescribed course of study. At the time of her enrollment, Smith lacked a science course, and so most of her class work was in writing, literature, geology, ethics, comparative religions, philosophy, music, and art. By the end of her college tenure, however, she had concentrated in science and wrote a senior thesis on evolution. By September 1885, as she entered her final year at Smith, Merriam had an obsession with birds that began at the encouragement of family friend Ernest Thompson Seton. C. Hart, who at that time had become the chief of the U.S. Biological Survey and one of the founders of the American Ornithologists' Union, nominated her as the first female associate of the Union. The following January, Merriam, who had befriended Fannie Hardy Eckstrom, was aghast to find that her friend was following a popular fashion of the time by wearing bird feathers in her hat. As more of their classmates took up the practice, Merriam began advocating both on and off campus for the protection of birds and alterations to the millinery industry. In 1886, Merriam published a series of newspaper articles in New York, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C., arguing for an end to bird feather hat decorations. On February 11, 1886, the naturalist George Bird Grinnell wrote an editorial proposing the formation of an "Audubon Society" for the protection of wild birds. One month after Grinnell made this call, Merriam and Hardy, who by this point had stopped wearing feathered hats, created one of the first local chapters of the Audubon Society at