Who invented mary had a little lamb

Just think of them all: editor of a very popular magazine, publisher of many famous authors, crusader to make Thanksgiving Day a national holiday, successful campaigner to complete the Bunker Hill monument, supporter of innumerable other causes… and at the same time raising five children as a single mother. She was incredible. But this question will not go away, and for some reason that poem is often all anyone knows of Sarah Josepha Hale, so it must be addressed again.

She is clearly named as the author of these poems on the title page. The next year, , the same poem was set to music by Lowell Mason in his book, Juvenile Lyre , and entitled Mary had a little lamb. Three years later, in , she published this poem once more in her School Song Book, where, once again, she is clearly named as the author on the title page.

It is a simple poem, published with clear authorship. Sheep are very poor mothers. It is astonishing. They reject lambs especially twins ; they drop their lambs in unfortunate places and die, leaving the lambs orphaned.

These lambs may be adopted by other sheep, or may need to be bottle-fed. My mother grew up on a sheep farm in Putney, Vermont and talked all her life about the bottle-fed lambs. They are sweet, wooly things that follow their adopted parents everywhere until they are weaned. Ideal pets until they abruptly grow into sheep, herd animals with no remaining interest in their human parents.

The little lambs often ended up in school. They were delightful and quite disruptive. Our teacher, Mrs. Heddell, finally turned them out. If we were soon assigned the task of writing a poem which we were not, Mrs. Heddell was much more interested in math , I suppose many of us would have written about those lambs. A lamb or two in school is just not unusual in a farming community. Poems about lambs written by children must have been commonplace during the sheep boom also.

In a nine year-old child named Mary Sawyer was caring for, like many farm children, an orphaned lamb that was born in March of This took place at the Redstone Schoolhouse in District No. That same day a ten year-old boy, John Roulstone, Jr. The next day he is said to have handed Mary a slip of paper upon which he had written a poem about her lamb.

That said, did you know the whole thing was based on a real-life little lady and her lamb? She recognized my voice, and soon I heard a faint bleating far down the field. More and more distinctly I heard it, and I knew my pet was coming to greet me. As the story goes, Mary did try to hide the lamb under her desk in a basket at her feet , but she was quickly discovered by the teacher who made the animal wait outside until class was over.

In , poet Sarah Josepha Hale added a few stanzas with a moral lesson about treating others with kindness and love. Now you can share this fascinating backstory with the little ones in your life the next time you enjoy the nursery rhyme together! While there is no deeper, hidden meaning behind the lyrics, the story behind this popular nursery rhyme is an interesting one. Was Mary an actual person? According to the popular story, in , at the age of nine, a girl named Mary Sawyer found a sick newborn lamb when she was assisting her father on their Sterling, Massachusetts farm.

Mary convinced her father to let her keep the little lamb for a pet, her dad fearing the lamb would not survive. But to his great surprise, Mary took loving care of her little lamb and it grew up to be healthy and strong. On one occasion, Mary was walking to school and turned to find that the lamb was following her.

Delighted, she managed to hoist the lamb over the gate of the schoolhouse. Not wanting to part with her beloved pet, even for the school day, Mary snuck her lamb inside and tucked a blanket around its little body to keep it hidden. She was almost successful in her endeavor, but the teacher called her up to the blackboard and the jig was up when the lamb emerged from underneath the blanket and trotted behind her to the front of the classroom. The teacher instructed her to put it outside where it waited dutifully until Mary brought it home over the lunch hour.

She mothered three lambs.