The century of the automobile dramatically reshaped the Sandy Spring landscape. Gravel roads swelled into four- and six-lane highways that leveled all before them. General stores, seldom a mile apart, succumbed to scattered mall supermarkets. Wheelwright shops became extinct and the village blacksmith an endangered species. The new mobility spawned suburbs that invaded from every direction, devouring farms and all but snuffing the farm economy; Olney ballooned from a few hundred residents to more than 30,000. Today traffic chokes Sandy Spring's main arteries--Route 108 and Georgia and New Hampshire Avenues--with no bypass surgery in sight. The Annals of 1905, noting that two Sandy Spring doctors had purchased cars, declared "The automobile has taken up its abode amongst us." Prophetic words.

Pre-auto travel was arduous beyond belief. When Thomas Lea and wife Betsey (of later cookbook fame) were starting their trek from Brandywine, Delaware, to Walnut Hill, Thomas wrote: "I will leave with wagon and four horses, oxen and cart all loaded, six cows and 1 bull, one Doz. Sheep." He added proudly: "When my stock arrives it will make the Maryland Farmers open their eyes."

Muddy and rutted, Muncaster Mill Road slopes down toward the mill before being paved in the 1930s. Houses, utility poles, and a barn hug the impassable track. Arline Turner, a survivor of the unpaved roads era, recalls farmers hauling rocks from their fields to the shoulders of old New Hampshire Avenue.