Mary Had a Little Lamb Home Destroyed by FireFrom The Worcester Telegram:STERLING [MA] — The birthplace of Mary Elizabeth Sawyer, the girl who became famous for bringing her lamb to school in the poem, "Mary Had a Little Lamb," has been destroyed by fire. Fire officials are calling it arson.
About 4:30 Sunday morning [8/12/07], the Fire Department received a phone call from a neighbor saying the house at 108 Maple St. was in flames. Firefighters arrived to find the house — in which no one has lived for about 18 years — engulfed in flames.
The cause of the fire is under investigation by the state fire marshal’s office, as well as Sterling police and fire investigators. The barn to the house was destroyed by arson on Halloween 1979. Miss Sawyer, who was born in 1806, took the lamb to school at the urging of her brother about 1820, when she was 14 years old, according to Maryanne MacLeod, former longtime member of the Sterling Historical Commission and leader of a past effort to restore the house and preserve it as a museum. She said the lamb had been abandoned by its mother, and as is common with young animals, followed its caregiver around. The house, which never had running water or electricity, had been unoccupied for years and was in disrepair, according to Ms. MacLeod. She said the National Trust for Historic Preservation gave the Historical Commission a $1,000 grant in 1997 for an architectural assessment of the house, but that the effort to restore the house encountered obstacles, and it continued to deteriorate. It remained owned by family members, she said. According to the Fire Department, the house is owned by the Melone family of Clearview Farm. According to Ms. MacLeod, MaryJean Sawyer Melone, who lives in town on a farm, is a great-great-great-great-niece of Mary Sawyer, who married in 1835 but never had children. She died in Somerville in 1889.
The poem was written by John Roulstone Jr., a Harvard University student, a teenager a few years older than Mary E. Sawyer at the time, said Ms. MacLeod. She said Mr. Roulstone was living with an uncle in Sterling and assisting Mary’s teacher as part of his education.
When called to the front of the class to recite something Ms. MacLeod said, the lamb followed her, and the children laughed. Basing his verse on a an old English poem about a lamb that followed a girl named Lucy to school, young Roulstone penned the poem about Mary that gained sustained popularity in this country. A sign on a tree near the remains of the house known as the "Mary Had a Little Lamb House" offers a $5,000 reward from the Arson Watch Rewards Program at (800) 682-9229 for information leading to the arsonist, and states that all information would be kept confidential.
The town still has a symbol of its connection to the famous poem, a statue of a lamb on the town Common.
"The ["Mary Had a Little Lamb"] nursery rhyme was first published as an original poem by Sarah Hale on May 24, 1830, and was inspired by an actual incident...As a girl, Mary Sawyer (later Mrs. Mary Tyler) kept a pet lamb, which she took to school one day at the suggestion of her brother. A commotion naturally ensued. Mary recalled: 'Visiting school that morning was a young man by the name of John Roulstone, a nephew of the Reverend Lemuel Capen, who was then settled in Sterling [MA]. It was the custom then for students to prepare for college with ministers, and for this purpose Mr. Roulstone was studying with his uncle. The young man was very much pleased with the incident of the lamb; and the next day he rode across the fields on horseback to the little old schoolhouse and handed me a slip of paper which had written upon it the three original stanzas of the poem....'
"There are two competing theories on the origin of this poem. One holds that Roulstone wrote the first four lines and that the final twelve lines, more moralistic and much less childlike than the first, were composed by Sarah Hale; the other is that Hale was responsible for the entire poem...
Lowell Mason set the nursery rhyme to a melody in the 1830s, adding repetition in the verses:
Mary Had a Little Lamb Lyrics
Mary had a little lamb,
It followed her to school one day
And so the teacher turned it out,
"Why does the lamb love Mary so?"
Hear a midi version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" here.
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"The Redstone School, which was built in 1798, was purchased by Henry Ford and relocated to Sudbury, Massachusetts. It now sits on the grounds of 
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