As soon as Columbus started his explorations of the Americas in the late 15th century, a European effort to find valuable medicinal plants among the flora of the New World to add to the medical canon got underway.  Early New World medicines uncovered included guaiacum from the West Indies (for coughs, rheumatism and a wide variety of other uses), sassafras from Florida, copaiba from Brazil, Peru balsam  and, most famously, cinchona bark from Peru, also called "Jesuit's bark" in honor of its discoverer, which became the first effective treatment for malaria.  The active ingredient of this cinchona bark, quinine, was the primary treatment for malaria well into the 1940s.  "About 170 drugs used by the Indians of British North America, and perhaps 50 used by the indigenous people of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America" became important enough in the U.S. (as the practitioners of chemistry and pharmacy eventually catalogued, analyzed and understood them) to merit listing in the United States Pharmacopoeia (est. 1820) or the National Formulary.
In the early 1700s, James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia colony, with the financial backing of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London and others, launched an effort to identify and transplant beneficial plant species from the tropical colonies to Savannah, Georgia.  Unfortunately for Oglethorpe (and all the Southern colonists) the expedition that marked this first attempt by an organized group of Old World apothecaries to benefit from British North Americas potential as a medicine farm never bore fruit.  The Caribbean expeditions lead investigator, botanist Robert Miller, was hampered by illness and uncooperative Spanish colonials, and all support from London ceased when Miller died without much success.