Thanksgiving (United States) The most prominent historic thanksgiving event in American popular culture is the 1621 celebration at the Plymouth Plantation, where the settlers held a harvest feast after a successful growing season. Autumn or early winter feasts continued sporadically in later years, first as an impromptu religious observance and later as a civil tradition. The Plymouth settlers, known as Pilgrims, had settled in land abandoned when all but one of the Patuxet Indians died in a plague. After a harsh winter killed half of the Plymouth settlers, the last surviving Patuxet, Squanto (who had learned English and avoided the plague as a
Saint Augustine Historical Society history of Saint Augustine, colonial East Florida, and Saint Johns County. The collection includes maps, photographs, vertical subject files, church records, circuit court cases, city government records, manuscript collections, circuit court records, and biographical files. It is a closed-stack library with a small reference collection in the main reading room, and is free to the public. The two hundred and thirty year-old building was built as a private residence and was the birthplace of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith (1824). It was given in trust to the Saint Augustine Library Association in 1895, and was a free public library until