Mary Elizabeth Tyler née Sawyer was an American woman from Sterling, Massachusetts. She is thought to be the “Mary” who inspired the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” At least that was a claim she made at age 70. However, the authorship of the rhyme remains unknown, and there is no absolute proof that the Mary was the right Mary or that there was truly such an incident at all.
The Redstone School, which was once attended by Tyler, now stands in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Mary Elizabeth Sawyer was born on March 22, 1806, on a farm in Sterling, Massachusetts, to Captain Thomas Sawyer and Elizabeth Houghton. She was the younger of their two children. Sadly, her father passed away when she was just 19 years old. The family lived at 108 Maple Street in Sterling. Their place was known as the Sawyer Homestead. Due to the story around Mary, the property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. Unfortunately, it was tragically destroyed by an arsonist in 2007.
The way the story about the lamb played out was slightly different that the famous nursery rhyme. The rhyme makes it seem that the lamb followed Mary to school, but in reality, Mary did have a pet lamb as a young girl, but it was at her brother’s suggestion, she took the lamb to school that day, which caused quite a stir. Mary remembered that a young man named John Roulstone, nephew of Reverend Lemuel Capen in Sterling, was visiting the school that morning. At the time, it was common for students to prepare for college with ministers, and Roulstone was studying with his uncle. Delighted by the lamb incident, he returned the next day on horseback to the old schoolhouse and handed Mary a slip of paper with three original stanzas of a poem written on it. However, this story rests solely on Mary’s recollection, as the slip has never been found. The earliest known publication of the poem appears in Sarah Josepha Hale’s 1830 collection, supporting her claim as the sole author.
Although there’s no evidence to back it up, several spots in Sterling, Massachusetts, keep the story alive. In the town center, there’s a 2-foot statue and historical marker for “Mary’s Little Lamb.” The Redstone School, where Mary supposedly went and the incident allegedly happened, was built in 1798. Henry Ford later bought the property and moved it to a churchyard at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. In 1835, Sawyer married Columbus Tyler, a Vermont native who served as steward of the McLean Asylum in Belmont, Massachusetts, for about forty years, while Mary worked there as a matron. They built a large home in Somerville, Massachusetts, and were instrumental in founding the city’s First Unitarian Church, completed in 1845. Mary was active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Women’s Relief Corps and also helped establish the Women’s Industrial Exchange. There is no record of the couple ever having had children.
In 1876, at 70 years old, Tyler claimed she was the “Mary” from the poem. The following year, she joined nineteen other women in helping to save Boston’s Old South Meeting House by selling fleece from her pet lamb, attached to autograph cards. The fleece had once been made into socks by Mary’s mother. Tyler passed away on December 11, 1889, at the age of 83, and she was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, beside her husband, who had died eight years earlier at 76.
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