Marylanders rightly regard themselves as relatively removed from nature's worst disasters: hurricanes, earthquakes, fierce electrical storms, tornadoes, and devastating droughts. Yet excepting earthquakes, each occasionally strikes, seldom catastrophically but often severely enough to refresh our gratitude for their infrequency. By far the most costly disaster is the scourge of fire, sometimes caused by lightning, sometimes by spontaneous combustion, often by human carelessness and sometimes by arson. These scenes give a sampling of Sandy Spring's brushes with the hard hand of nature and arrant man.

Four times in 30 years the Patuxent River leaped its banks and flooded the valley home of Mason and Lydia Haviland on Haviland Mill Road. Here Charlotte and Phyllis Haviland wade in the lawn during a 1956 deluge. Tropical storm Agnes hit hardest, in 1972, when water swirled 19 inches above the second floor. From their refuge in the upstairs bedroom, Mason and Lydia tucked the family cat in a styrofoam picnic cooler, launched it and themselves from a bedroom window, and swam with the cooler to high ground.

Tom Lansdale's Sherwood Mill burns to the ground on an April Sunday in 1966--a scene watched by hundreds of churchgoers. The structure had been built by his father Richard H. Lansdale II in 1921. The cause of the fire was not determined. Fire crews from Hillandale and Kensington struggled vainly beside Sandy Spring firemen to combat the blaze. Lansdale rebuilt and continued milling into the 1980s.