Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, the daughter of Helen E. Dyer and Robert Noah Smith, was bom on September 28, 1856, in Philadelphia. Robert Smith died when Kate was three years old, and Helen Dyer Smith took her two daughters to Portland, Maine. Kate's mother married Dr. Albion Bradbury in 1863, and the family moved to the nearby town of Hollis, Maine, where they lived until 1873, when they moved to Santa Barbara, California. Wiggin finished her studies at Abbott Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, before joining her family several months later.

During her childhood, Wiggin enjoyed a chance encounter with Charles Dickens on a train trip between Portland and Boston. She described this meeting in A Child's Journey with Dickens and again in her autobiography, My Garden of Memory. Her schooldays at Gorham Female Seminary inspired her first published story, "Half a Dozen Housekeepers," accepted by St. Nicholas magazine...