open forest at Jamestown, perhaps similar to vegetation density in 1607 (but trees are much smaller today)
In 1607, Captain Newport led 108 English colonists to a Virginia filled with oak-hickory forests, where deer and turkey were the most-hunted species.
Virginia looked very different at the last glacial maximum 18,000 years ago. The ice sheets stopped in Pennsylvania, roughly along the line of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but the colder climate dramatically reshaped the vegetation and shoreline of Virginia.
In the Ice Age, the forests of Virginia had a high percentage of spruce (Picea) trees. These evergreen conifers are common in Canada. There's a belt of spruce and fir trees south of the tundra in the far north, and those cold-adapted species can be found along the high crest of the Appalachians south to Tennessee.
But when the glaciers reached into Pennsylvania, was there an equivalent belt of spruce and fir to south, further south a broad-leaved trees?
Arguments are still raging regarding what the Virginia forest looked like then. Pollen grains have been collected from sediments that accumulated in various lakes and bogs during the ice ages. As far south as Louisiana, we find spruce pollen - but in Virginia, we also find high percentages of warm-species trees, such as oak and hickory. There's other evidence, such as indications of sand "blowouts" on the Coastal Plain, suggesting that Virginia's vegetation was an open pine woodland about 15,000 years ago
The first Virginians arrived in the state then. Especially east of the Appalachians, they probably found a mixture of pines and prairie - not a thick, closed-canopy conifer forest such as you see in Ontario or the temperate forest that covers Virginia today. The earliest Virginians probably found bison, mastodons, and elk grazing in Virginia grasslands, and has only scattered trees for screening their approach during a hunt.
As the climate changed and the temperate forest cover developed across Virginia, the Native Americans adapted to the change. In one region, the Shenandoah Valley, they may have limited the forest growth on purpose by setting fires often. This increased the acres of grassland, which increased the number of deer and elk. The prehistoric fire ecology of the valley is not completely understood - hey, we're just realizing the fire ecology of forests, and why Smokey Bear's prevention efforts were counterproductive in some areas. It is likely that Native Americans were well aware of the environmental impacts of natural fires and capable of enhancing the percentage of their desired habitat in the valley by increasing the number of fires.
When three English ships sailed up a river they named the James in 1607, they found a substantially different Virginia from what greeted the first arrivals 15,000 years earlier. The climate had changed in those millenia. The Europeans arrived during the worst drought in the last 400 years - but they still arrived in a wetter, warmer Virginia than the first set of discoverers.
As the climate had gotten warmer and wetter, broad-leaved trees had become the dominant forest type in most of Virginia. The spruce and fir were still common on the ridgetops in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian highlands, and pines were still a major component of the forests on the Coastal Plain. Rainwater rapidly drained from the surface and below the root zone, so drought-adapted pine species had a competitive advantage east of the Fall Line.
The climate of Virginia could change again, altering the current pattern of biomes across the world. If global warming does actually occur, then the remaining pockets of spruce and fir could disappear from Virginia's mountains. Grasslands could replace the temperate forests in Virginia, and the state's vegetation patterns could resemble the sand hills of Nebraska or the oak forests of the Sacramento Valley.