Marjory Stoneman Douglas - Early Life

Early Life

Marjory Stoneman was born on April 7, 1890, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the only child of Frank Bryant Stoneman (1857–1941) and Lillian Trefethen (1859–1912), a concert violinist. One of her earliest memories was her father reading to her The Song of Hiawatha, at which she burst into sobs upon hearing that the tree had to give its life in order to provide Hiawatha the wood for a canoe. She was an early and voracious reader. Her first book was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which she kept well into adulthood until "some fiend in human form must have borrowed it and not brought it back". She visited Florida when she was four years old, and her most vivid memory of the trip was picking an orange from a tree at the Tampa Bay Hotel. From there she and her parents embarked on a cruise from Tampa to Havana.

When she was six years old, Marjory's parents separated. Her father endured a series of failed entrepreneurial ventures and the instability caused her mother to move them abruptly to the Trefethen family house in Taunton, Massachusetts. She lived there with her mother, aunt, and grandparents who did not get along well and consistently spoke ill of her father, to her dismay. Her mother, whom Marjory characterized as "high strung", was committed to a mental sanitarium in Providence several times. Her parents' separation and the contentious life with her mother's family caused her to suffer from night terrors. She credited her tenuous upbringing with making her "a skeptic and a dissenter" for the rest of her life.

As a youth, Marjory found solace in reading, and eventually she began to write. At sixteen years old she contributed to the most popular children's publication of the day, St. Nicholas Magazine—also the first publisher of 20th century writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rachel Carson, and William Faulkner—with a puzzle titled "Double Headings and Curtailings". In 1907, she was awarded a prize from the Boston Herald for a story titled "An Early Morning Paddle", about a boy who watches a sunrise from a canoe. However, as her mother's mental health deteriorated, Marjory took on more responsibilities, eventually managing some of the family finances and gaining a maturity imposed upon her by circumstance.