11/23/2023
You may have missed this, if you do not receive the Carolina Digital Daily. If you do not get it, visit the Mercury's website and rectify that.The real history of Thanksgiving is worth knowing, so please enjoy and share with your family and friends.
The Grinch who stole Thanksgiving
Editor’s Note: In 2010, we published the vast majority of this article; we have edited it only slightly to reflect the perspective of the current year. This article was not intended for The Onion or for the purpose of satire; it is the real deal. Forward with vigor, especially to your Yankee friends. It may not be the breaking news of the truth behind the Polish plane crash, but it is still a really big deal and a source of pride for our newspaper family.
By Tom Robinson
It appears that Massachusetts is losing its grip on its claim as the site of the First Thanksgiving. Generations of gullible Americans have been eating turkey dinners, participating in silver-buckled Pilgrim-hat programs at their children’s elementary schools, and generally believing that it all began at Plymouth Plantation.
There was a thanksgiving in October 1621, lasting three days. But it wasn’t the first. The British settlers of Plimoth Plantation (correct spelling) did share meals with the Wampanoag Indians, although the Wampanoags may have contributed more to the party than the Brits. The religious separatists were city folk who did not know how to hunt or grow crops. The friendly natives taught them how to fish, eel, dig for clams and raise corn. For the feast, they provided five deer and much waterfowl (not turkeys).
The event has been documented in a letter from Edward Winslow to a friend back in England:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
Not so fast, Yankee.
Oooops. Two years earlier than the Pilgrims, on December 4, 1619, Captain John Woodlief debarked from the Margaret in what is now Charles City, Virginia with 37 men from England’s Berkeley Parish. They all knelt down and thanked God for their safe journey. Actually, they were ordered to do that according to the charter of the Virginia Company of London:
“We ordaine that the day of our ships arrivall at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”
You’ll find their vow carved on a brick gazebo on the grounds of Berkeley Plantation, marking the location believed to be where Woodlief prayed beside the James River.
Though many historians agree that there was a prayer, there was not necessarily a feast with turkey and mashed potatoes. Nor any Indians. So, it may not count as a real Thanksgiving for skeptics.
Ironically, the Mayflower of Massachusetts fame was actually destined for Virginia, too, but was blown off course only to find safe harbor at Cape Cod.
No, Virginia, you weren’t first either.
Oooops, again. Carolinians will be happy to know that the first Thanksgiving held by Englishmen on the North American continent may have taken place at the “Lost Colony” on Roanoke Island, in now North Carolina in 1586. This celebration included 100 men from Cornwall, England, who Sir Walter Raleigh had brought to America. Although there is no official documentation, lore has it that local native chiefs Manteo and Wanchese celebrated a Thanksgiving with the colonists and later traveled to England themselves.
The Spanish settlers of the Americas beat the British, not only to the country, but to the first Thanksgiving contest. One such claim comes from the West Coast Spaniards, who survived a perilous trek across the Chichuahuan Desert and made it to what is now El Paso, Texas. Explorer Juan de Ońate, after recuperating for ten days, ordered a day of thanksgiving on April 30, 1598. It included game provided by the Spaniards and fish by the local natives. Franciscan missionaries said a mass and Ońate read La Toma — The Taking — declaring the land now that of King Philip II of Spain. (Indians to Europeans: “Thanks for nothing.”)
The real winner was, however, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who on September 8, 1565, threw the first documented Thanksgiving party in St. Augustine, Florida.
University of Florida historian Michael Gannon published a report of such an event in a scholarly book entitled The Cross in the Sand in 1965. An Associated Press reporter came across the item 20 years later, and Gannon became momentarily famous as the “Grinch who stole Thanksgiving” … from Massachusetts, Virginia, Carolina and Texas.
So, what is a “Thanksgiving” and how do you figure out which one was first? Native Americans — including Pueblo, Cherokee, Creek, pre-Columbians and others — have for centuries organized harvest festivals, ceremonial dances and other celebrations of thanks. Dr. Gannon says key to his assertion is that St. Augustine’s was the “first community act of thanksgiving in a permanently established European settlement.” The key word in that sentence is “permanent.” He wrote that numerous thanksgivings for a safe voyage and landing had been made before in Florida, by such explorers as Juan Ponce de León, in 1513 and 1521, Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528, Hernando de Soto in 1529, Father Luis Cáncer de Barbastro in 1549 and Tristán de Luna in 1559. Indeed, French Calvinists (Huguenots) who came to the St. John’s River with Jean Ribault in 1562 and René de Laudonnière in 1564 similarly offered prayers of thanksgiving for their safe arrivals; however, all of those ventures — Catholic and Calvinist — failed to put down permanent roots.
The Florida Thanksgiving claim boasts a string of other features that give it indisputable credentials. It was a religious ceremony to thank God. The celebrant of the Mass was St. Augustine’s first pastor, Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, and the feast day in the church calendar was that of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Check. Indians were invited. The “Town of (Chief) Seloy” was already occupied by the Timucua tribe; Menéndez invited them to share in the feast. Check. There was food. Most likely, the main dish would have been cocido, a stew made from salted pork and garbanzo beans, laced with garlic seasoning, and accompanied by hard sea biscuits and red wine. The natives would have provided local turkey, venison and gopher tortoise; seafood such as mullet, drum and sea catfish; maize (corn), beans and squash. Check. It’s documented. Official records scribed by Father López remain archived in various libraries. Check mate.
Official Recognition
Thanksgiving observances have been officially recognized for some time. On June 20, 1676, the governing council of Charlestown (Massachusetts, that is) declared June 29 as a Day of Thanksgiving. George Washington proclaimed in October 1798 that a day of thanks and prayer be observed. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November as the official observance. Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving back to the fourth Thursday in 1939. Fred Lazarus, Jr., founder of the Federated Department Stores (later Macy’s), is credited with convincing Roosevelt to push Thanksgiving back a week to expand the shopping season.
In his 1962 proclamation, President John Kennedy extolled the Plymouth event. A Virginia state senator, John Wicker, wrote Kennedy citing Virginia’s claim. He received a reply from Arthur Schlesinger on behalf of JFK, who apologized for the error that could only be attributed to the “unconquerable New England bias on the part of the White House staff.”
In the end, Massachusetts has cried uncle. “We were not the first Thanksgiving,” said Jennifer Monac, Plimoth Plantation’s public relations manager to Margot Pope of the St. Augustine Record in 2005. She said the Wampanoag People have lived in the area of now Plymouth, Mass., for more than 12,000 years of giving thanks in their daily lives. According to Monac, “the 1621 celebration that the public clings to as the first Thanksgiving was a three-day harvest festival to celebrate the harvest with 90 Wampanoag men and the 50 surviving colonists. It was a time of games and celebration and a gathering of people, but not as an act of thanksgiving. If you were to talk to the Pilgrims of 1621, they would tell you that the three-day harvest festival of 1621 was not Thanksgiving.”
Ah, but have all the English-speaking Protestants succumbed. Gannon thinks the word is finally, but slowly, getting out. Yet, he’s well aware that the victors write the history books. And history, once written, is hard to change. So is the Peanuts special that reinforces — quite humorously — the Yankee lies to our youngsters.
“The English wrote the history and established the traditions,” he says. “That’s life. Get over it.”
Ethnic pride among an increasingly large Spanish population in the United States — or a successful 2024 presidential candidate from the “Sunshine State” — might keep interest in the issue alive. Further, St. Augustine has long since celebrated the 500th anniversary of Ponce de León’s 1513 arrival in La Florida and the 1535 founding of the oldest continuously inhabited city. Many tourists or historians have now gone home fully aware of the real history, but it will take time to get the pilgrim and Mass. Indians story in its truthful place and enter in a Florida state of mind.
