Thanksgiving Virginia and a sparsely documented 1621 celebration at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts. The 1619 arrival of 38 English settlers at Berkeley Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia, concluded with a religious celebration as dictated by the group's charter from the London Company, which specifically required "that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned ... in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God." The 1621 Plymouth feast and thanksgiving was prompted by a good harvest. Several days of Thanksgiving were held in early New England history
History of Massachusetts of the Indian population before the first large-scale arrival of settlers in the 1630s. Large numbers of natives were decimated by virgin soil epidemics such as smallpox, measles, influenza, and perhaps leptospirosis, against which they had no immunity. In 1617–1619, smallpox killed 90% of the Native Americans in the region. The first English settlers in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, established their settlement at Plymouth in 1620, and developed friendly relations with the native Wampanoag. This was the second successful permanent English colony in North America, after the Jamestown Colony. Before heading to the New World, they migrated to Holland to escape