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The Thanksgiving before the 'first' Thanksgiving
CULTURE & HISTORY
The Thanksgiving before the 'first' Thanksgiving
An excavation provides tantalizing hints about a little-known group that celebrated Thanksgiving two years before the New England Pilgrims.
BY ANDREW LAWLER
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 19, 2018
Berkeley Plantation, VA: The autumn sun was rapidly dropping toward the broad James River when two pieces of reddish baked clay, each not much larger than a thumbnail, emerged from the Virginia mud. Mark Horton, an archaeologist from the UK’s University of Bristol, gave the fragments a lick with his tongue and peered closely at tiny patterns incised into the objects. After a moment’s pause, he said, “We are looking for a needle in a haystack—I wonder if this is it!”
Horton’s needle is physical evidence from the site of the first English Thanksgiving in the New World—one that took place five hundred miles south of Plymouth Rock and nearly two years earlier. Here, just thirty miles upstream from Jamestown, a little-known group of religious-minded settlers celebrated with prayer their successful voyage from England in December 1619, and pledged to do so annually on the same date. ... In just three years, however, the settlers’ community, known as Berkeley Hundred, came to a sudden and bloody end after a deadly attack by Native Americans, part of a larger uprising that nearly wiped out the entire Virginia colony. Eighteenth-century colonists subsequently built an elegant plantation house on the site that still looms over the James. Here, President William Henry Harrison was born and the melancholic tune Taps was first played by a Union soldier during the Civil War. But until now, no seventeenth-century artifacts have ever been found on the thousand-acre property that might point to the location of the original Berkeley Hundred settlement.
....
Three dozen male Berkeley settlers landed here on December 4, 1619. Their first order of business, according to their instructions, was to say the following prayer: “We ordain that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantation, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.” ... The men likely knelt on the cold ground by the shore. So far as can be known, there was no feast and no Native Americans were present. In fact, under Anglican tradition, they may have fasted rather than feasted.
That this celebration occurred two years before its more famous counterpart in New England has long rankled Virginians. When Massachusetts-born President John F. Kennedy issued a Thanksgiving proclamation in 1962 touting the Pilgrim’s establishment of the holiday, a Virginia senator complained. One of the president’s last acts before his assassination the following year was to acknowledge “over three centuries ago, our forefathers in Virginia and Massachusetts, far from home, in a lonely wilderness set aside a time of Thanksgiving.”
....
The Thanksgiving before the 'first' Thanksgiving
An excavation provides tantalizing hints about a little-known group that celebrated Thanksgiving two years before the New England Pilgrims.
BY ANDREW LAWLER
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 19, 2018
Berkeley Plantation, VA: The autumn sun was rapidly dropping toward the broad James River when two pieces of reddish baked clay, each not much larger than a thumbnail, emerged from the Virginia mud. Mark Horton, an archaeologist from the UK’s University of Bristol, gave the fragments a lick with his tongue and peered closely at tiny patterns incised into the objects. After a moment’s pause, he said, “We are looking for a needle in a haystack—I wonder if this is it!”
Horton’s needle is physical evidence from the site of the first English Thanksgiving in the New World—one that took place five hundred miles south of Plymouth Rock and nearly two years earlier. Here, just thirty miles upstream from Jamestown, a little-known group of religious-minded settlers celebrated with prayer their successful voyage from England in December 1619, and pledged to do so annually on the same date. ... In just three years, however, the settlers’ community, known as Berkeley Hundred, came to a sudden and bloody end after a deadly attack by Native Americans, part of a larger uprising that nearly wiped out the entire Virginia colony. Eighteenth-century colonists subsequently built an elegant plantation house on the site that still looms over the James. Here, President William Henry Harrison was born and the melancholic tune Taps was first played by a Union soldier during the Civil War. But until now, no seventeenth-century artifacts have ever been found on the thousand-acre property that might point to the location of the original Berkeley Hundred settlement.
....
Three dozen male Berkeley settlers landed here on December 4, 1619. Their first order of business, according to their instructions, was to say the following prayer: “We ordain that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantation, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.” ... The men likely knelt on the cold ground by the shore. So far as can be known, there was no feast and no Native Americans were present. In fact, under Anglican tradition, they may have fasted rather than feasted.
That this celebration occurred two years before its more famous counterpart in New England has long rankled Virginians. When Massachusetts-born President John F. Kennedy issued a Thanksgiving proclamation in 1962 touting the Pilgrim’s establishment of the holiday, a Virginia senator complained. One of the president’s last acts before his assassination the following year was to acknowledge “over three centuries ago, our forefathers in Virginia and Massachusetts, far from home, in a lonely wilderness set aside a time of Thanksgiving.”
....
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