Climb aboard this time machine and let your mind travel back to Sandy Spring as it was in the late 1800s. Now look about you at that vastly different—yet in some ways familiar—community of more than a century ago.

The old roads of this earlier Sandy Spring are vaguely familiar. That's because they run along the paths of today's main arteries—Georgia Avenue, New Hampshire Avenue, and Route 108. But back then they are unpaved and rutted, and alternately muddy and dusty. They are called turnpikes: A boom known as a pike blocks your horse and buggy until you "turn" it by paying a penny or two, at toll gates at Sandy Spring, Olney, and Ednor.

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.

These are "the people called Quakers." Some of their ancestors arrived in the early 1700s as the earliest settlers of Sandy Spring In large measure they defined Sandy Spring's character. Anglican farmers settled among them, followed soon by Catholics and Methodists. Through their work and that of their slaves they cleared the forest and raised tobacco and corn.

In the hundred-plus square miles of the Sandy Spring neighborhood grew up a mosaic of crossroads communities—Ashton, Mechanicsville (now Olney), Brookeville, Brighton, Brinklow, Ednor, Norbeck, and others. Each of these villages featured a general store and post office, a blacksmith shop and wheelwright shop. Largely self-sufficient, claiming residents of diverse religious affiliations, these crossroads communities nevertheless felt an allegiance to the Quaker hamlet of Sandy Spring, which served as the focus important institutions such as the farmers' clubs, the insurance company and bank, the Lyceum lecture hall, the historical record known as the Annals, a proud succession of fine schools, and numerous social groups.

In our Sandy Spring of the late 1800s, agriculture is the source of virtually all wealth; nine out of ten Sandy Springers live and work on the farm. Barns dominate the subdued skyline, amid a cluster of outbuildings: corncrib, smokehouse, icehouse, woodshed, pig pen, chicken house, carriage house, springhouse, outhouse, perhaps a tenant house that once was a slave quarters.

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.

back to the top