 The primary figure of the Merritt family was Leonidas.He was born in Chautauqua County, New York, where he lived until age 7, when he moved to western Pennsylvania until age 12.In 1856, his family moved to live in a community of five or six families in Duluth, Minnesota, just after the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe transferred land from the Indians and where his father, Lewis H. Merritt, worked as a lumberman and a millwright.