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Click to search the Museum's collections database online
The Museum welcomes researchers to the Ladson Library, a top quality research and storage facility built by the Museum in 2007. The Sandy Spring area has a long tradition of innovation, including 18th century action to manumit enslaved people, innovations in fertilizing and farming that foreshadowed the 20th century, and leadership in the women’s suffrage movement starting right after the Civil War. These stories are reflected in the Ladson Library collections.
Visitors are welcome to search our online collections database. Thanks to American Heritage, our collections and those of several other small Maryland museums are searchable online. Click here for a direct link.
Research Services: Sandy Spring Museum welcomes your research questions, but with our limited staff it takes time for us to respond. Please use the research request form to give us as much information as you can about your research question. We will be in touch about whether we can help, how, and what the research fees may be.
We welcome researchers to arrange to work in the archives by appointment, and we will work with you to prepare relevant materials. Admission to the Museum for research costs $5, and we charge modest additional fees for photocopies and scanned images.
If you wish to have the research done for you, we will send you an estimate of the research time involved, and the estimated charge for that time at approximately $35/hour. Photocopy and scanning fees also apply.
Please review the highlights of the collection below, and send us your research questions.
The Museum collects archival materials and artifacts pertaining to these local stories and others. Our collection area includes eastern Montgomery county and western Howard county, as well as some materials relating to other nearby and predecessor jurisdictions. Specific strengths include:
• rural economy (18th through 20th century) (farming, milling, lumbering, orchard and dairy industries, tobacco/slavery and freedom),
• transportation (the C&O canal, the B&O railroad, roads, horses, wagons, carriages, and early automobiles), and
• education (primary through university level, innovations, schools for girls, schools for African-Americans)
• life in the rural villages that built today’s “megalopolis” (general store records, family history, historic homes, land deeds, marriage and birth records)
The Library’s earliest collection is an index to Montgomery County manumission records by slave owner and by the name of the person freed. Created by hand over years of painstaking work in county and state deeds, the Museum’s manumission records are a first stop for anyone looking to understand Quakers and slavery, the transition from slavery to freedom for individuals and families, and the different economic, social, and political impact of early manumission and later emancipation.
The Library also holds the original minutes published as The Annals of Sandy Spring, a multivolume record of one of the community’s numerous social clubs. These groups of 14-16 families began meeting after the Civil War and continue meeting monthly to the present. Groups focus on different interests, family and home life, changes in the neighborhood, agricultural issues, horticulture and gardening, women’s lives, to name a few, and keep monthly minutes of their meetings. The minutes of the social clubs offer a record of American community life in detail unmatched elsewhere – enabling researchers to chart everything from social and cultural change to climate change, month by month, from about 1870 to today. The Annals, and the archives that support them, offer researchers a uniquely rich archive on how social capital was built and sustained and how its presence has affected individual and family lives, in both white and African-American communities.
The Library collects primary source material related to notable local institutions, including the Mutual Insurance company, the Sandy Spring Bank, the first bank to welcome African Americans and both sexes as depositors in their own right, and Montgomery General Hospital, the nation’s first rural hospital.
Researchers interested in Maryland history will find records of the Brooke family (first European settlers in the area in the 1650s), local planter, educator, and political leader Allen Bowie Davis (1809-89), the Stabler family, including Edward Stabler (1794-1883), designer of the official seals for the U. S. Senate, House of Representatives, Treasury, Post Office, Supreme Court, Department of State, and many others. Benjamin Hallowell, educator and founder of the University of Maryland, and Isaac Briggs, engineer and surveyor for both the Erie Canal and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canals, came from this area and records of their families are available here.
Researchers interested in genealogical and family history will also find rich resources on local families.
17901 Bentley Road • Sandy Spring, Maryland 20860 • 301.774.0022 • electronic mail • sitemap
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