The well-known nursery rhyme, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” purportedly tells the story of a real lamb and its owner, Mary Sawyer Tyler (1806-1889), who as a young girl was followed by her pet to the Redstone School in Sterling, Massachusetts. While questions remain about the veracity of Tyler’s claim, what is definitively true is that as an adult she was one of the founding preservationists who saved Boston’s Old South Meeting House from demolition. Tyler did so by donating wool from her stockings and attaching it to cards claiming, “Knitted wool from the first fleece of Mary’s Little Lamb.”