Familiar, too, are many of the homes and families of that bygone era. More than a hundred houses of that old Sandy Spring still stand today. Scores of familiar names, of families black and white, enjoy equal antiquity. Reassuringly, those sturdy institutions the bank and insurance company conduct their steadily expanding business across from the venerable Sandy Spring Store.

Most familiar is the Quaker Meeting House. Back then, wooden partitions separate the sexes, a large buggy shed stands out back, and the cemetery holds fewer grave markers. But today's mellow brick structure is basically unchanged since the Friends built it in 1817. The distance the early Quakers traveled to meeting on horseback-as much as five and six miles-would set the boundaries of the greater Sandy Spring neighborhood.

In many ways our earlier Sandy Spring is a totally different world.

Along each dirt road roughly a mile apart stand small country stores, selling groceries and canned goods, clothes, and basic hardware. Here neighbors discuss the weather and crops and perhaps the next barn-raising, and maybe on rainy days ponder a few games of checkers.

You study the people you encounter: Quickly you recognize among them a distinctive group—individuals who though prosperous and educated are conspicuously plain of dress. The men wear drab suits and broad-brimmed hats, the women simple gray costumes with shawls and tiny bonnets with few ribbons; young women do not let the ears show or the hair fall down the back. The speech of these people is also different: thee and thy instead of you and your; First Day and Second Day instead of the "heathen" names for weekdays.