The locale 'Sandy Spring' is in reality two places: a village, and a hundred-square-mile neighborhood encompassing many villages. The neighborhood evolved first, bounded by the five or six miles that early Quaker farm families traveled on horseback to reach their Sabbath Meetings, near a bubbling spring. The geographic name "Sandy Spring" first appears in Quaker records of the 1750s. The village came surprisingly late. In 1817 Quakers erected their brick Meeting House; simultaneously a Sandy Spring Post Office opened with James P. Stabler postmaster. Two years later Stabler and Caleb Bentley opened a general store at the site of today's Sandy Spring Store and built a blacksmith shop nearby--and Sandy Spring village was born.

During this period Anglicans and other settlers were taking up lands among the Quakers. Blacks acquired freedom and worked their own or others' farms. Together across the centuries these neighbors interacted to spin the distinctive web of relationships and institutions that define today's Sandy Spring--an admittedly peculiar entity often referred to as "a state of mind."

Sam T. Hill, here with horse Star, won wide respect for competence and industry as a farmer. He operated the Sandy Spring Farm, on which rises the spring, and the neighboring Harewood farm of Secretary of State and Mrs. Dean Acheson. Sam T. and wife Mary raised 18 children.