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
Plymouth, Massachusetts Plymouth was established in December 1620 by English separatist Puritans who had broken away from the Church of England, believing that the Church had not completed the work of the Protestant Reformation. Today, these settlers are much better known as the "Pilgrims", a term coined by William Bradford. The Mayflower first anchored in the harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts on November 11, 1620. The ship was headed for the mouth of the Hudson River near Manhattan, which was part of the Colony of Virginia at the time, but it did not go beyond Cape Cod. The Pilgrim settlers realized that they