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
Matanzas Inlet inlet, the southernmost access for boat travel between St. Augustine and Havana, Cuba. Shortly thereafter, in 1742, a coquina stone tower square by high, now called Fort Matanzas, was built by the Spanish authorities in Florida to safeguard this strategic inlet. René Goulaine de Laudonnière founded Fort Caroline in what is now Jacksonville, in 1564, as a haven for Huguenot settlers. In response to the French encroachment on what Spain regarded as its territory, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine in 1565. Menéndez de Avilés quickly set out to attack Fort Caroline, traveling overland from St. Augustine. At the