Augusta Browne Garrett (ca. 1820–82) holds a special place as one of the first successful and prolific woman composers in the United States, as she was identified in musicologist Judith Tick's pioneering study American Women Composers before 1870. Based on the archival resources available prior to the digital revolution and access to scanned nineteenth-century sources, Tick posited that Augusta was the “first woman to become famous in the United States for her musical compositions.” Examples of Augusta's sheet music not yet catalogued at the time of Tick's dissertation, but now digitized and searchable in the Library of Congress Music of the Nation, the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, the Sheet Music Consortium, and a growing number of special collections databases, enable a more complete evaluation of the composer's work. The rising tide of digitized nineteenth-century newspapers, books, and magazines contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the composer's life, background, and output. Her unfamiliar story emerges as both old fashioned and strikingly modern.

Augusta Browne's outsider status and self-agency offer a potent narrative that transcends antebellum and Victorian-era norms in America. She constructed a substantial legacy in American music and journalism through talent, craft, persistence, outreach, and nineteenth-century equivalents of modern marketing strategies. The Americanness of her story resounds across the decades: an earnest little girl growing up in the context of a struggling family business; a young professor of music who burst onto the New York City musical scene with skill and flair; and an entrepreneur who resolutely sought publication of her music and prose to her final day. Her experiences amid Jacksonian democracy, waves of immigration, the divisive Civil War, and Reconstruction place Augusta in the maelstrom of US history during defining decades.

She earned regional recognition in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston cultural circles and was a familiar figure to many East Coast publishers, but perseverance and productivity do not always bring fame or renown.