Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving – a time of gratefulness and remembrance – on Thursday (Nov. 23).

Harvest festivals existed in the Americas among Native tribes as well as in Europe but tradition points to Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621 as the first Thanksgiving celebration.  A year earlier, a group of Puritans (later known as Pilgrims) had traveled to the Americas on the Mayflower, landing in Plymouth.

The first winter there was difficult and many died until they were aided by a Native American man named Squanto who helped them plant corn, identify plants and learn to fish.

1621 was a good harvest and historians said sometime between September and November, Plymouth colonists and members of the neighboring Wampanoag tribe celebrated with a three-day feast. The first Thanksgiving meal reflected the bounty from the surrounding lands – deer, corn, shellfish and roasted meat, such as duck, geese and chicken. Likely on the table were vegetables such as onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots and peas.

There is no record that the first Thanksgiving included turkey, a staple of the modern celebration.

The second Thanksgiving celebration was held by colonists in 1623 to mark the end of a long drought. Scattered Thanksgiving feast continued in the coming years until President George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide Thanksgiving celebration in America on Nov. 26, 1789. Then, on Oct. 3 1863 and, prompted by public efforts and a Union victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Nov. 26 would be a national Thanksgiving Day to be observed each year on the fourth Thursday in November.

From Lincoln’s proclamation

“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, …to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving… And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him …, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”