Berkeley Hundred and 17 days before the Pilgrims arrived aboard the "Mayflower" at Plymouth, Massachusetts to establish their Thanksgiving Day in 1621. On March 22, 1622, Opchanacanough, head of the Powhatan Confederacy, began the Second Anglo-Powhatan War with a coordinated series of attacks against English settlements along the James River, known in English histories as the Indian massacre of 1622. Nine colonists were killed at Berkeley. The assault took a heavier toll elsewhere, killing about a third of all the colonists, and virtually wiping out Wolstenholme Towne on Martin's Hundred and Sir Thomas Dale's progressive development and new college at Henricus. Jamestown
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