On a spring day in 1892, a group of 29 academics, artists, and environmentalists gathered in a spacious law office at the First National Bank building in San Francisco to form a “Sierra Club” that would “explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast." In the organization's founding charter, they wrote that the Club would also serve to help “enlist the support and cooperation of the people and government in preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada."

In the 124 years that have passed since the Sierra Club's historic founding, the once-29-member club has become the nation's largest grassroots environmental organization, with over 2 million members and supporters. In honor of the Club's 2016 anniversary, here are 10 interesting facts you didn’t know about the organization's founding:

1) John Muir may have helped found the Sierra Club, but he didn’t come up with the idea for it on his own. Joachim Henry Senger, a German language professor at the University of California, and Muir’s magazine editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, each separately suggested to the Scottish American naturalist that he start an advocacy group to protect California’s wild places. Luckily, they both agreed Muir should be the Sierra Club’s president.

2) The building where the Sierra Club was founded was completely destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, along with the organization’s first headquarters.

3) John Muir missed the Sierra Club’s first meeting, which was held at the California Academy of Sciences.

4) The 29 founding members who signed the Club’s Articles of Incorporation had an average age of 37. John Muir was 54.

5) Of the 182 charter members who joined during the first five months after the Sierra Club’s founding, at least 29 were born outside of the United States, just like the group’s president, John Muir.

6) The Sierra Club’s youngest charter member was 11 years old (John Muir’s daughter). Its oldest was 78-year-old Galen Clark, who was the first European American to discover the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia trees and served for 24 years as the first Guardian of Yosemite National Park.

7) About one-third of the Club’s charter members were college students or professors.

8) One charter member, botanist Frederic Bioletti, was first cousin to the elderly barber that the Beatles sing about in their hit single “Penny Lane."

9) Other notable charter members included a banjo teacher, a stenographer, a taxidermist, the wife of an Oakland farmer, the inventor of the cable car, and the founder of Pasadena’s annual New Year’s Rose Parade.

10) Early Sierra Club members were required to pay $5 in annual dues—the equivalent of about $133 in today’s currency.