Amidst these structures rises the farmhouse, sometimes brick, more often frame, the kitchen detached to protect against fire from the wood stove and open fireplace. This is the domain of the toiling farm wife. Assisted perhaps by a maid, she stokes the fire, scrubs the clothes in a galvanized or wooden tub, irons, makes the beds, cooks three country meals a day, washes the dishes, dusts, gathers vegetables, cleans the chimneys of the kerosene lamps, cans fruits and vegetables, churns the butter, sews and darns, packs the children's lunches for school, and processes the avalanche of pork at butchering time. ("A man's work is from sun to sun./A woman's work is never done.")

In our earlier Sandy Spring, black Americans far outnumber whites. A 1900 survey will show 1,000 Negroes, 700 whites living in the Sandy Spring area. Many are freed slaves and their descendants. Others were attracted as freemen and freewomen before the Civil War—drawn to a community in which many Quaker landowners freed their slaves decades and generations before the conflict, and often gave them land. Some own or rent productive farms; many work on white farms, in the fields and in the homes. They are indispensable contributors to Sandy Spring's agricultural prosperity.

In your trip back in time, you have left behind the convenience of gasoline engines and electric motors, You now are back in a horse economy, in which each farm keeps six or eight valued animals. One or two of them pull the buggy or carriage, and four to six pull the farm wagon, which hauls in hay and wheat from the fields and transports crops to market. The horses also plow the fields and order the soil for planting. Some farmers keep a pair of mules and many a pair of oxen, valuing their stubborn strength at pulling rock carts and yanking out stumps.