"Mary Had a Little Lamb" Goes to Print
On this day · 24 May 1830
On a spring day in 1830, a slim book of children's verse gave the world one of the most familiar rhymes ever written.
On May 24, 1830, the poem now known as “Mary Had a Little Lamb” first appeared in print. Originally titled “Mary’s Lamb,” it was published in Poems for Our Children, a slim collection issued by the Boston firm Marsh, Capen & Lyon.
The credited author was Sarah Josepha Hale, a New Hampshire writer and influential magazine editor who later campaigned for a national Thanksgiving holiday. Her sing-song tale of a lamb that follows Mary to school was meant to teach gentle moral lessons, and it caught on far beyond the classroom.
A four-line opening that millions of children would memorize began life in a forgotten book of moral verse.
Authorship is still debated. Some accounts credit a young man named John Roulstone with the opening stanzas, inspired by a real girl, Mary Sawyer, who reportedly brought a pet lamb to her Massachusetts school. Whatever its exact origins, the rhyme endured, and in 1877 its opening line became among the first words Thomas Edison recorded on his phonograph.
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