@roamer_1 @Lando Lincoln Where I grew up in MD on land that has been in the family since the 1600s, there were few large rocks, and the oaks I grew up shaded by were planted by an ancestor just shy of 200 years ago. Boundaries were marked by large ditches, and the remnants of one was just north of the house I lived in as a child, built in the 1950s. We used it a a trench playing 'army' as kids, and other remnants exist in the region, many of which are now obscured by yet another growth of pine woods or agriculture. Natural waterways were also boundaries, and fairly stable in the tidewater, at least between major storms. When I revisit the area, I can see changes, but those have occurred over decades, although hurricanes and major storms can alter a shoreline in a weekend.
As for edible/medicinal wild plants, there was a blackberry patch or two I recall from my youth, and I recall a boxwood over at a manor across the creek, (at the site of the manor house there) ripped from the ground by developers, that was likely 350+ years old. Few of the trees in the orchard had survived around the old manor house on either side, and the outbuildings had long fallen to hurricanes, vandals, scrounging fro lumber, and invasion. (Yes, MD was invaded by union troops, less than 50 years after the British came ashore and sacked Washington). While the stables were long gone, there was a priest's hole that had a tunnel from the house to the stables my mom and uncles played in as children.
The old barns (pre war--"civil" war--had mortise and tenon joints in the beams, and the major framing elements were pegged together. I spent many summers filling them with hay bales, and recall two being burned to the ground one Halloween. Mutterings of "spontaneous combustion" were squelched by the house sized shed in between that suffered no ill effects: the buildings collapsed within a few minutes o each other, not a fire that spread from one to another, but simultaneous arson. The offenders were never caught.
The tobacco barns were from later, built by my grandfather in the (19)30s, of trees cleared from the land and cut in his sawmill. In a humid and temperate climate, insects can destroy untreated wood structures fairly fast, and those barns did not survive with the exception of one preserved as an historical curiosity. When the time came to harvest that crop, it was all hands on deck, and as I grew older, I progressed from dropping sticks to spearing tobacco plants onto those sticks, to loading them onto the cart and unloading them, to cutting tobacco, and finally, to hanging it in the barn to cure. In MD we air cured the plants, rather than heat cure them, and the entire plant would be cut, speared at the base in groups of four to six plants on a stick, the stick placed between tier poles in the barn and the plants left to hang there until cured.
When that was done, the plants were removed from the sticks and the leaves stripped off the stalks by grade (bright leaf, dark leaf, and 'tips') and bundled, the bundles stacked on large baskets and shipped to the tobacco auctions where the crop was sold. The once commonplace sight of truckloads of tobacco thus packed going to market is gone, and with it the innumerable stoop labor jobs that taught kids the value of hard work, and provided a paycheck for many between the fish runs of the early summer, crabbing, and oyster season in the fall, not to mention the elder fellows who would sit about and strip the tobacco in early winter. Since early colonial times, when tobacco was literally used as money, and as acceptable as silver, the crop was important in the colonial and later economy.
I would find it fascinating to cover that area with LIDAR scans and see what remnants of the old colonial era drainage systems exist. I know there are foundations left from the later structures, the old oyster packing house, the Hotel, stores, and numerous homes and cottages destroyed by hurricanes in the 50s and earlier, or burned through arson or happenstance, and there was an air warden tower there as well during WWII to scan the Potomac for enemy planes and even vessels during the war.
And there is always the possibility that some prehistoric features (earthworks) may be present as well. Projectile points and other artifacts we found as kids go back some 3000 years in age, there may be more there than meets the casual eye.
One plant that did grow wild in abundance was Poison Ivy--vines I recall that looked like small trees. It was the bane of my youth, and remains a significant deterrent to scrounging around in much of the area down there.
Here and now, 2000 miles and decades away, there are still swathes of relatively undisturbed prairie that would similarly yield information on habitation sites and who knows what else not obliterated in the last glaciation.
