Thanksgiving Day Origins

The first recorded day of thanksgiving in our part of the New World occurred on August 9, 1607 in Phippsburg, Maine, by colonists who had arrived on The Gift of God and the Mary and John under the leadership of George Popham. They had landed at St. George’s Island “gyvinge God thanks for our happy meetinge & safe aryval into the country.” But this was a one-time event because in the late summer of 1608, on the pinnace, Virginia of Sagadahoc, probably the first ocean-going ship built in the New World, the ones who had survived the harsh winter, packed up and headed back home.

Nearly two centuries later, President George Washington proclaimed that November 26, 1789, should be a day of general thanksgiving for the adoption of the Constitution. But this was also a one-time event.

Our current national Thanksgiving Day dates from President Abraham Lincoln’s time. On October 3, 1863, he proclaimed an annual holiday on the fourth Thursday in November, to be a national day of thanksgiving.

Sarah Josepha Hale, a 74-year-old magazine editor, had written a letter to Lincoln on September 28, 1863, urging him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival." She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritative fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution."

Over time, just as Armistice Day (the celebration of the end of World War I) lost its significance and was transformed into a generic Veterans Day, Lincoln’s day of thanksgiving lost its relevance. To preserve the substance of the celebration, however, a mythology grew up mostly in the public schools linking our national day of thanksgiving to the feast at Plimouth Plantation, when pilgrims and Indians gathered in the fall of 1621 to celebrate the harvest and the newcomers' survival through the first difficult year in the New World.

The feast in 1621 that Edward Winslow described in a letter to an acquaintance in England probably occurred earlier in the fall. His own words give a sense of the event we know as the first Thanksgiving in 1621, taken from Plymouth Colony, Its History and Its People, 1620-1691, by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, p. 24:  

"Our harvest being gotten in, our Governour sent foure men on fowling, that so we might after a more speciall manner rejoyce together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labours; they foure in one day killed as much fowle, as with a little helpe beside, served the Company almost a weeke, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our armes, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest King Massasoyt, with some nintie men, whom for three dayes we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deere, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governour, and upon the Captaine, and others. And although it be not alwayes so plentifull, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so farre from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plentie."

Venison was the featured entree. The "fowle" were likely wild turkeys. The English had learned about cranberries from the native Americans and also made a stewed pumpkin dish called "pompion." It is served today at reenactment feasts at Plimoth Plantation and reported to be quite tasty.” They also ate lobster. So it was a surf and turf banquet!

Regardless of your historical views, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving, or as one anxious native who recently crossed my back yard put it, “Gobble, gobble!”