Short Stuff: Mary Had A Little Lamb

This episode dives into the surprisingly controversial origin story of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb," exploring whether it was based on a real girl named Mary Sawyer from Massachusetts or entirely made up by women's magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale from New Hampshire. Two rival Massachusetts and New Hampshire towns have been feuding for centuries over who deserves credit for the rhyme, complete with sworn statements from the elderly women involved and even intervention from Henry Ford himself in the 1920s. It's a delightful mystery about authorship, local pride, and how a simple children's poem became the subject of a genuine historical dispute that remains unsolved to this day.