Andrej Kmeť was born the son of a village blacksmith and was the youngest of eight children. At six he began attending school in Žarnovická Huta, which prepared him for grammar school in Banská Štiavnica. His lifelong interest in botany emerged there. Notable members of the Piarist order taught at the school, where instruction was in German. After completing the sixth year, he entered the seventh year of the so-called minor seminary in Trnava. He also completed the eighth year there before going to Esztergom to study theology. After his studies he served as a chaplain in Senohrad and later as a parish priest in Krnišov. From 1906 he lived in retirement in Martin. Although he had no formal training in archaeology, he was among the first Slovak intellectuals to study it systematically. His contemporaries called him the Slovak Schliemann. During excavations in Beša he unearthed and preserved a mammoth skeleton. He also devoted himself to folklore. As a student he published a collection of folk Christmas songs; while working as a priest, he recorded folk legends and tales, studied customs, and collected embroidery and lace, which he promoted at home and abroad. In 1873 he organised an exhibition of embroidery from Hont at the World Exhibition in Vienna. In 1891 he presented Slovak lace at the Czecho-Slovak Jubilee Exhibition, and in 1895 at the Czecho-Slovak Ethnographic Exhibition in Prague. He took these Slovak treasures to the 1893 World Exhibition of Women's Work in Paris. He also attended a Slavic exhibition in the USA in 1904. He helped organise a lace exhibition in Martin in 1887 and an exhibition of folk crafts in Hont in 1895. On his initiative, the Lipa joint-stock company was founded in Martin and the Embroidery Cooperative in Skalica in 1910. In geology, mineralogy and palaeontology he worked with professors at the Mining and Forestry Academy in Banská Štiavnica. He discovered several new plant species, and about 40 plants, particularly roses and fungi, were named after him. Andrej Kmeť assembled a herbarium of 72,000 specimens: 39,000 higher plants, including around 6,000 roses, and 33,000 lower plants, including 25,000 slime moulds. He also gathered 1,733 seed samples belonging to 516 genera. The herbarium is held by the Slovak National Museum. In 1892 he proposed founding a Slovak Learned Society based in Martin with branches in every Slovak town. He drafted its statutes himself, and they were adopted. This initiative marked a milestone in the development of Slovak national science. Wherever Kmeť worked, he campaigned against alcoholism and established a school nursery, a church library, a reading society, an agricultural technical and economic library, and a fruit-growing association. He wrote popular booklets and articles not only for Slovak magazines and newspapers, including Obzor, Katolícke noviny, Národné noviny, Orol, Národný hlásnik and Pútnik svätovojtešský, but also for publications in other languages, such as Österreichische botanische Zeitschrift, Uhorské noviny and Deutsche botanische Monatschrift.
Život mesta sa dodnes sústreďuje v jeho historickom jadre. Sem smerujú kroky každého návštevníka, lebo tu sú na malom priestore sústredené významné historické pamiatky a v priehľadoch z ulíc a námestí možno vidieť raz tú, raz inú architektonickú dominantu. V historickom centre mesta stoja domy niekdajších banských ťažiarov a bohatých mestských kupcov a remeselníkov. Niektoré si dodnes zachovali pôvodné gotické časti, najmä portály, ale väčšina bola prestavaná v 16. storočí v renesančnom slohu. Fasády týchto domov sa pýšili bohatou výzdobou. S hladkými plochami fasád kontrastujú masívne arkiere na členitých a neraz sochársky opracovaných konzolách. Honosnosť renesančných meštiackych domov zvyšovali bohato zdobené portály, neraz s rodinným erbom a heslom okolo neho. Banská Štiavnica je jedným z najkrajších a historicky najzaujímavejších miest na Slovensku. V decembri 1993 sa mestu Banská Štiavnica dostalo najvyššieho medzinárodného uznania, keď bolo historické jadro mesta spolu s technickými pamiatkami v okolí zapísané do Zoznamu svetového kultúrneho a prírodného dedičstva UNESCO.