Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. A lot of us probably grew up with childhood pets, dogs, cats, goldfish, hamsters, maybe a lizard or a snake. If you were the adventurous type, that is, and if you're anything like me, your pets were more than just animals. They were friends,
They were parts of the family. And that's how it was for the person at the center of this story too. Her name was Mary Sawyer. She was born on her family's farm in Sterling, massachuse It's in eighteen oh six, and at ten years old, she developed a curiously close relationship with one of the farm animals. One afternoon in eighteen sixteen, Mary was out doing chores with her father when she stumbled on a tiny white figure laying in
the grass. It was a baby lamb. It had been abandoned by its mother, and now it was curled up there sick, frail, and helpless, Mary begged her father to let her bring the lamb home and try to nurse it back to health. He said okay, so she scooped up the animal off the ground and carried it into the house. There, she wrapped the lamb in a piece of old clothing and sat with it in front of the fireplace all night long. By the time the sun rose, the lamb was strong enough to stand up on its own.
For the next few days, Mary fed at milk from their family's sheep. Mary grew to love that lamb, and it loved her too. As soon as it could walk, it started following her everywhere, which was, you know, cute, until the ten year old had to go to school. That is, One morning, as Mary and her brother Nat walked to the red Stone School, Mary heard a faint bleeding sound behind her. She turned around and saw the lamb trotting up the street. Nat suggested that they bring
the animal to school. The kids got to class before their teacher, Miss Kimball. Mary put her lamb underneath her desk and covered it with a basket, hoping that she'd be able to keep it hidden. Miss Kimball arrived the lesson began, and for a while everything seemed to be going according to plan. But then the teacher called on Mary to stand up and read something out loud. When Mary got up from her seat, the lamb jumped out from beneath the basket. It bleeded super loudly, and just
like that, the ruse was up. Mary turned bright red. She was worried that she was going to get in trouble, but Miss Kimball didn't look angry. She was doubled over laughing. So were all of Mary's classmates. Apparently, the image of Mary being followed around by a lamb who was so clearly obsessed with her was hilarious. Still, Miss Kimball told Mary that she couldn't bring the pet back to school in the future.
The animal home and it stayed there. However, the lamb's story was far from over. The Next day at school, an older student named John Rolson handed Mary a piece of paper. On it was a poem he had written. It said, Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. And thus an immortal nursery rhyme was born. Well sort of There's actually some debate about how Mary had a Little Lamb became such a popular rhyme.
The story that I just told you is Mary Sawyer's version of the events. However, the poem wasn't actually published until fourteen years later in a book written by Sarah Josepha Hale. When Mary saw the poem in print, she was confused. Sarah's version included three extra stanzas which talked about the lamb being caught in the classroom, but Mary had no idea how Sarah knew the story or how
she got the lines that John Rollstone had written. According to Sarah, she didn't know the Stone and she hadn't taken any lines from John. She claimed that she made up the entire poem on her own. By this point, John Rollstone was dead and the slip of paper that he'd given to Mary was long gone, without any proof that he had penned the poem. Mary and Sarah's literary feud continued for years. Finally, they both agreed to sign a statement saying that the other was not lying, which
was pretty confusing. It meant that Mary conceded that Sarah's poem was original, while Sarah conceded that she hadn't plagiarized the first stanza, and the story itself both couldn't be true at the same time. But there you are. Even after Mary Sarah and that Little Lamb passed away, people still argued over the nursery rhyme's true origin. In nineteen twenty seven, over one hundred years later, a book titled The Story of Mary and Her Little Lamb was published.
The author argued that John Rollstone should get credit for writing the famous rhyme. As for that author's name, it was a guy named Henry Ford. He'd become so obsessed with the legendary lamb that he not only wrote a book about it, but he also purchased the Redstone School where the entire saga had begun. These days, Sarah Josepha Hale is usually credited as the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb, But now you know that the real story is far more complicated and a lot more curious.
When discussing how he built his entertainment empire, Walt Disney once said, if you can dream it, you can do it, which certainly sounds nice, right, And if it were true, the world would be a much simpler place. But Disney's advice ignores the more practical aspects of business. Just take the story of one of his contemporaries, the automobile mogul Henry Ford, for example. Ford had no shortage of dreams.
Born in eighteen sixty three in a Michigan farming town, he moved to Detroit at sixteen to begin working as a machine operator's apprentice. In the late eighteen hundreds, he started toying around with the idea of a so called gasoline powered horseless carriage. Over ten years later, his rudimentary designs evolved into the world's first manufactured automobile, the Ford Model T. It was a hit from the moment that
it went on the market in nineteen oh eight. Ford had to innovate to meet the ever growing demand for cars. You probably know that he invented the assembly line, which made the production of vehicles cheaper and more efficient, So finding labor wasn't necessarily the problem finding materials was. You see, by the late nineteen twenties, other car companies had sprung up. The production of vehicles was at at all time high.
Sourcing materials became a challenge, and it was especially difficult and expensive to get rubber, which at the time was created from the sap of the rubber tree. While other companies might have tried to strike deals with rubber manufacturing plants, Ford, ever, the dreamer, went a different routes and I'm very different. Ford set a meeting with representatives from the Brazilian government.
By the end of the conversation, he had purchased two point five million acres of land in the Amazon rainforest. He called his new property Fordlandia, and he planned to turn it into a self sufficient utopian city where he could farm an endless supply of rubber. Construction began immediately. Ford had a huge water tower installed. Cape Cod's style
homes were built behind white picket fences. There were swimming pools, a tennis court, a golf course, and the most important part of all, miles upon miles of rubber trees were planted in Fordlandia. As for who actually did the planting, well, Ford hired native Brazilians. However, for all his lofty ideals about having a self sufficient utopian community, Ford put a lot of restrictions on what his living employees could do.
No one was allowed to drink alcohol. Food was provided, but the menu consisted of brown rice, whole wheat, bread, oatmeal, and canned peaches. As you might imagine, this didn't do much to raise morale. Beyond the abysmal dining conditions ford Landia was dangerous. Sure. Ford had put in homes and luxury amenities, but he didn't really know anything about living in the Amazon. Deadly snakes prowled the area, scaring the employees.
Malaria ran rampant because Ford didn't provide mosquito nets. After a while, employees started calling Henry Ford's utopia Inferno verde or green Hell. In nineteen thirty, they staged a rebellion that got so extreme that Brazilian military had to intervene. On top of all of this, Ford's rubber trees, the whole reason that he had started for Landia to begin with, weren't thriving the way he hoped. He brought in a botanist to figure out the problem. It turned out pretty
much everything was wrong. You see, when rubber trees grow in the wild, they're usually pretty far away from one another, so they have ample room to expand. But Ford had put his trees in a tight grid, essentially suffocating them. Plus the soil quality in Fordlandia was so poor that even if the trees had been planted further apart, they
probably wouldn't have grown anyway. By nineteen forty two, the Fordlandia farm was producing about seven hundred and fifty tons of latex each year, but in order for Ford's huge investment to break even, he needed to be producing fifty times that much thirty eight thousand tons, that is. But if Ford thought that it couldn't get any worse, his Amazonian utopia was soon plagued by fungus caterpillars and a
blight on the rubber trees themselves. In nineteen forty five, he had to face the facts he could not do it simply because he had dreamed it. Fordlandia was an utter failure. So Ford sold the land back to the Brazilian government at a loss of about twenty million dollars. And get this, not a single drop of rubber produced in Fordlandia ever made it into a Ford vehicle. It didn't need to. Synthetic rubber became widely available in the
nineteen forties, rendering Henry Ford's entire project useless. Of course, he still went down in his as one of the most savvy businessmen who ever lived These days, most people don't know about his Amazonian disaster, which is why I consider it my duty to bring the curious Tale of Fordlandia straight to your ears. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.