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.[4] 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".[4] 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.[5] From there she and her parents embarked on a cruise from Tampa to Havana.[6]