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
Spanish assault on French Florida a breastwork of earth and fagots. This was the beginning of the Spanish colony at St. Augustine, which became the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the United States. When, in May of the following year, the settlement was temporarily moved to what was considered a more advantageous position on Anastasia Island, the first location received the name of "San Agustín Antigua" (Old St. Augustine) from the Spaniards. Menéndez at once began disembarking his troops, landing two hundred of them. On Friday, September 7, he sent his three smaller ships into the harbor, and three hundred more colonists were landed,