National Thanksgiving Proclamation as 1607, with the first permanent settlement of Jamestown, Virginia holding a thanksgiving in 1610. In 1619, the Berkeley Hundred colony held a service on December 4, 1619, to celebrate “the day of our ship’s arrival” and proclaimed the date would be “yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to the Almighty God.” The colony was wiped out shortly after, in March 1722, with some inhabitants being massacred, and the rest fleeing. The generally referenced 'First Thanksgiving' occurred on Plymouth Colony, shortly after the colonists first successful harvest in autumn of 1621. They celebrated for three straight
Pilgrims (Plymouth Colony) publication of Felicia Hemans's classic poem "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers". Pilgrims (Plymouth Colony) The Pilgrims or Pilgrim Fathers were the first English settlers of the Plymouth Colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Their leadership came from the religious congregations of Brownist Puritans who had fled the volatile political environment in England for the relative calm and tolerance of 17th-century Holland in the Netherlands. They held Puritan Calvinist religious beliefs but, unlike other Puritans, they maintained that their congregations needed to be separated from the English state church. They were also concerned that they might lose their cultural identity if they