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.