Did Mary Really Have a Little Lamb? The Strange Story Behind the Famous Nursery Rhyme

Sarah Josepha Hale was a writer and magazine editor who helped make Thanksgiving a national holiday. She is often called the “mother of Thanksgiving.” In 1839, she published a book called Poems for Our Children. Her goal was to teach moral lessons through simple, enjoyable rhymes.

One poem was about a girl named Mary. Mary had a little lamb with fleece as “white as snow.” The lamb followed her everywhere, even to school one day. The children “laugh and play” when they saw it. But the teacher sent the lamb out of the class. The lamb waited patiently outside for Mary. At the end, the teacher tells the children that they could have such a devoted animal too, if they treated all animals kindly.

“Mary’s Lamb” became a favorite among children. Later, the composer Lowell Mason put Hale’s words to music. It became the beloved nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Mason’s version would not sound familiar to us today, though. The rhyme was adapted later to the tune we know now, which was based on a minstrel song called “Goodnight, Ladies.”

Hale’s poem found another place in history in 1877. It became the first audio recorded on the phonograph, an invention by Thomas Edison.

Hale supposedly got the idea for “Mary’s Lamb” from a real event during her days as a schoolteacher. But the true authorship is not as clear as the lamb’s white fleece.

Decades after Hale’s book appeared, an elderly woman named Mary Tyler came forward. She said she was the real Mary. As a girl in Massachusetts around 1815, she was named Mary Sawyer. She had nursed an abandoned lamb back to health and became devoted to it.

One day, her brother encouraged her to let the lamb follow her to school. She tried to hide it under her desk. When she was called to the front of the class, the lamb followed her. The teacher made it leave the room. An older boy named John Roulstone saw this and wrote a few verses. Those verses, according to Tyler, formed the foundation of the rhyme.

Mary enjoyed the poem so much that she began sharing it with her neighborhood. It soon spread across the New England area. Hale, who came from Newport, New Hampshire, must have heard it at some point. She then added three verses for her book.

Mary Tyler’s version of events had no evidence to support it. There is also no surviving copy of Roulstone’s original poem. Even so, over the years many people began to accept her claim. In her hometown of Sterling, Massachusetts, people still celebrate her as the true inspiration. A statue of the fabled lamb stands in the town center.

Perhaps the most surprising supporter of Tyler was Henry Ford, the automobile giant. In the 1920s, he bought her old schoolhouse for a heritage museum. He also wrote a short book arguing that Roulstone was the original author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

So did Mary really have a little lamb? The answer remains uncertain. What is clear is that a simple poem about a devoted animal became one of the most famous rhymes in the English language. Its journey from a schoolroom to a phonograph to a town statue shows how a small story can grow into a lasting legend.