I did a lot of summer fexerup contracting when I was in high school. Since I was good at most hands on stuff, I always seemed to be working on 200+ year old farm houses. Typically, the barns were gone, and the land was gone, and they were surrounded by a 1950s/1960s “house farm”. First thing I would do is sit there and think about where the barn used to be, the smoke house, the dump, the well, the root cellar — things that every farmhouse had. Most of these would be gone without a trace, but I could usually find the well and the root cellar. Often the openings were covered by a few timbers and a foot of dirt. Needless to say, the homeowners were grateful. Some of the wells and root cellars were in the basements of the houses.
We cousins just had a mini reunion at the family homestead where Mom lives. We’re in our 70s now, and were showing the youngsters where the barns and grainery used to be, and the one-room school house. All of it is just field now, but we remember all of it well.
Your screenname fits like a (work)glove!
Interesting work! The farms of various great-aunts/uncles that I visited many times as a kid, as well as familiar old landmarks closer to home, have turned into hobby farms surrounded by subdivisions, or lone barns with no house, or over time just a ploughed field.