SANDY SPRING NEIGHBORHOOD 



Sandy Spring is not a town or village or civil division of any sort, 

 but a natural division, a neighborhood, whose people are united by the 

 bonds of religion and bloodkinship, and contrasted more or less sharply 

 with the people of the adjoining territory by differences of thought, 

 feeling and custom. The first settlement was made by the Society of 

 Friends and the community has always been under their predominant 

 influence. The limits of the section at present occupied by this com- 

 munity are clearly defined. Most of the territory lies within the Olney 

 District, but a part of the Colesville District, as far east as Spencerville 

 is included. The real centre of the community is in the vicinity of 

 the Sandy Spring Post Office where are located the meeting houses, the 

 school, the Lyceum Hall, the old library and the banks, institutions 

 upon which the life of the community has been built. There is no town 

 or railroad within 10 miles of this point. 



It is not easy to say just when the first settlement was made, but the 

 earliest land records date from the beginning of the eighteenth century, 

 having to do with grants of land some of which are still in part held by 

 the families to which they were originally patented. There are records 

 of a considerable number of land transfers prior to 1750. The Friends' 

 Meeting, always the mainspring of the community life, has had a recorded 

 existence since 1753, a mention of it being contained in the minutes of 

 the Monthly Meeting at the Cliffs and Herring Creek under that date. 

 Many incidents in the subsequent history of this community are highly 

 important for an understanding of its present and would be exceedingly 

 interesting; but we can only pass them hastily in review. Before the 

 opening of the Revolutionary War, the meeting took up "the testimony 

 against slavery"; 1775 may be set as the approximate date after which 

 there was no settled policy of slave holding in Sandy Spring. Econo- 

 mically, as well as in other ways, the freeing of the slaves was a step 

 attended by important results, and the subsequent experiment of free- 

 labor owning the soil proved this to be a sounder economic policy than 

 the slaveholding system which it displaced. 



Shortly after 1830, local option was voted for the territory adjacent 

 to the meeting house, nearly 50 years before it was voted for the county 

 as a whole. And it is safe to say that it was the influence of this com- 

 minity, working through those many years, which ultimately brought 

 about the victory of the temperance cause in the county. Many in- 

 stitutions, closely associated with the development of the community 

 life, and still enjoying a flourishing existence, had their beginnings about 

 the_middle of the nineteenth century. In 1842 a Library Company 

 was_organized and a library started at Sandy Spring. In 1844 the first 

 Farmers' Club for men, and in 1857 the first club for women were 



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