Sigismund August Wolfgang Herder was born in Bückeburg, an economically diversified hill-town to the west of Hanover. Bückeburg owed much of its prosperity and intellectual dynamism to its status as the long-established administrative and commercial hub of Schaumburg-Lippe. The adjacent Bückeberg hills were an important source of building stone. However, later during 1776, August's family relocated to Weimar after his father accepted a church appointment there, mediated through the intervention of his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as "Generalsuperintendent". August was the second son of the philosopher-poet Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and his wife, born Maria Karoline Flachsland (1750-1809). Born into an enlightenment milieu, his godparents included Goethe, the Lutheran philosopher Johann Georg Hamann and the journalist-poet Matthias Claudius. Goethe, still a young man, undertook frequent trips to Italy during the 1780s and loved children. Being extremely fond of the Herder children, he allowed them to accompany him. As a teenager Goethe had himself acquired the habit of undertaking lengthy exploratory hikes through the countryside, and having retained the habit into adulthood, he sometimes permitted his friend's teenager son August to accompany him on his "expeditions". Another of his father's friends was the "Africa explorer" and naturalist August von Einsiedel. It was through the interest of these two mentors that August von Herder's interest in Natural sciences, and more specifically in Mineralogy, was awakened.
