Oh they definitely grew bigger then. Back then, you had gigantic, sometimes contiguous 4 and 500 acre ag fields where every farmable inch was planted and the deer bedded in the thick areas around the fence rows or in the old river bottom swamps. It wouldn't be nothing to see 50 deer come out of one corner of woods but them deer had hundreds of acres of fields to roam at night. Nowadays, them same fields being either cow pastures, CRP, or pine plantations, the deer have much more bedding areas and you don't see em all like you used to.