Smith and his crew sailed past Sparrow’s Point in 1608, observing its forest covered shore. Later in the colonial era, it became an agricultural landscape of tobacco and wheat farming. This property underwent industrial development in the 19th-century and it has remained an industrial area up to the present day. John Smith would be unable to recognize anything of Sparrow’s Point. Extensive sedimentation and dredging over the years has drastically changed this section of the Patapsco.