Ethnobotany is the study of plants in relation to their medical and cultural uses – a discipline explored in history, anthropology, environmental studies, and literature. Medical information, botanical expertise, ecological knowledge, and racialized prejudices evolved rapidly and concurrently in American history, especially in the 18 through 20th centuries. Examining the stories found in the ethnobotanical archives is a unique way to understand complex interactions across the racial and cultural borders of a rapidly transforming New World during these centuries of colonial settlement, Indigenous dispossession, and African enslavement.This research has the goal of examining the stories and silences in the ethnobotanical archives and the ways in which these stories and silences impacted and were constructed around marginalized racial identities. This investigation discovered that pursuing the narratives of medicinal plants in this place and this period of time illuminates the multifaceted and fraught ways in which disparate peoples becoming Americanized were both transversing and maintaining the boundaries that separated them.