SUDBURY – Tucked away on a scenic, picturesque road in the Wayside Historic District sits the red schoolhouse of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” fame, one of Sterling’s greatest prides.
According to Wikipedia, the well-known and recognizable 19th-century nursery rhyme that told the tale of a young woman whose beloved lamb followed her to school one day was first published in 1830 by the Boston publishing firm of Marsh, Capen & Lyon as a poem by American writer and Mary Sawyer’s teacher, Sarah Josepha Hale.
Built in 1798, the schoolhouse is known as the Redstone School, after the road in Sterling where it was originally located. Henry Ford, who had bought the nearby Wayside Inn, moved the one-room schoolhouse to Sudbury in 1927, and it was used as part of the town’s school system from 1927 to 1951, teaching grades one through four with one teacher.
Carol Williams has been providing education about the historic schoolhouse for more than 20 years. She can often be found sitting in a chair outside of it greeting visitors, asking where they are from and noting that in her log and offering interesting facts and stories about Mary Sawyer and her lamb.
“Sometimes we get people who attended the school,” she said on a recent sunny autumn day.
One of the many visitors who stopped by that day shared that he was from neighboring Wayland, and had never been to the schoolhouse before. Williams said a 93-year-old man from Florida came by once and said that he had been a student there.
The dedicated volunteer said that according to lore, a 10-yearold boy, “a child prodigy ordered by his father to observe the class,” heard Mary’s story and the next day came back with the first 12 lines of the poem.
“We’re not sure where the rest of it came from,” Williams stated. “The little boy or a friend may have finished it, but people couldn’t put together the facts from long ago.”
She said while the actual author or authors of the entirety of Mary’s story is not clear, what is known is that it was picked up by newspapers all over the country and instantly became a classic.
“It spread like wildfire. Everyone connected to the story about the country girl and her trusty companion,” Williams said. “Everyone was mesmerized by it.”
She said she has been to the Sterling Historical Society many times to research Mary Sawyer, and wrote a book about her that is copyrighted.
The schoolhouse, which is typically open to the public on weekends, recently closed for the season. Williams said they did not open it for a couple years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but a fair held near it this fall attracted more than 200 people, many of whom stopped by to check it out.
A descendant of Mary Sawyer, Diane Melone, moved into Mary’s family home at the end of Maple Street in Sterling along with her husband two years ago after retiring from running Clearview Farm down the road for decades. The original house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, had an estimated construction date of 1756 and was one of Sterling’s oldest surviving structures before it was destroyed by an arsonist in 2007 and then rebuilt by the Melone family.
A statue of Mary’s lamb sits on the town common in downtown Sterling, not too far from Mary’s home and where the schoolhouse originally sat. Unfortunately, the actual lamb was accidentally gored by a bull and died, the story goes, but the legacy of Mary and her love for the creature has continued to live on for generations.
