The First Thanksgiving was Celebrated in Virginia

A Tale from the Very Beginning

Welcome Back, and Thank You So Very Much for Reading! It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and I know most of y’all are with your families (as am I), so I’ll keep this article short. It’s a short and fun story I ran across when reading a fantastic book by one of my new favorite authors, and as it is one I hadn’t heard before, it is one I thought you might have not heard before either, and thus one you might find interesting. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!

A Note for those interested: The book from which it comes is The Great Plantation by Clifford Dowdey; Dowdey is one of the Old Dominion’s greatest historians, and he served as a protege of the famous Douglas Southall Freeman at The Richmond News Leader. The Great Plantation is the tale of the famous Berkeley Plantation, one of the oldest in America, and through it, he tells the tale of how Virginia became the fabulously successful colony and state it was—until destroyed by the War between the States.

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The year was 1619. A somewhat motley assortment of gentlemen adventurers, mechanics, farmers, and others—from tradesmen to sailors—had just landed in Virginia and, after passing Jamestown, sailed up the James River to what was to be their home for the indefinite future: The Berkeley Hundred, later called the Berkeley Plantation.

What they saw upon landing on the muddy banks of the New World, was the silent, primeval forest that was to be their home. It was a forest that they did not own, though they all had hopes of completing their years of labor and obtaining a piece of it. For now, it was owned by the Berkeley Company, funded by a collection of gentlemen and merchants—all of whom were safe back in England, far removed from the dangers of the New World—who had obtained it in 1618 through a land grant from the Virginia Company.

Sitting atop the north bank of the James River about twenty miles upstream from the Jamestown settlement that had been founded only a few years prior, in 1607, the Berkeley Hundred was a vast tract of about 8,000 acres that held much potential. That was potential, however, that could only be unlocked by vast amounts of backbreaking work and by braving innumerable dangers, from Indian attacks to starvation, wildlife to infighting.

So, those 38 men who landed on December 4, 1619, were there as employees of the Berkeley Company, to be the brawn that did the backbreaking work necessary to bring order, civilization, and profitability to the massive tract currently devoid of all three. They were to make it not just home, but both civilization and a profit center for investors and colonists alike. Indians lurked in the shadows, vast forests covered the land they aimed to soon be farming, and all knew that the task ahead of them was to be a monumental one.

So the first thing they did was pray. The just over three dozen men who had been deposited on the shore by the ship Margaret were led by Captain John Woodleefe, and he had been sent with specific instructions from the Berkeley Company to offer a prayer of thanksgiving upon their safe arrival, and to commemorate it with a day of thanksgiving celebrations. Such is what they did, as Clifford Dowdey describes, placing their luggage on the ground and gazing in wonder at the titanic forest surrounding them, in complete silence, before Captain Woodleefe began to pray.

“We ordaine that this day of our ships arrival, 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” was the prayer offered.

That was the first Thanksgiving in America, and it came nearly two years before the famous 1621 Thanksgiving celebration in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Further, unlike the Puritans’ harvest festival celebration, the Berkeley Thanksgiving was repeated annually—the second group of fifty Berkeley colonists landed in 1620 and celebrated the second annual Berkeley Thanksgiving ritual, for example—and was much more a religious celebration than a social festival.

So, why is it so little known? Because, though the Berkeley Company and its men intended for it to be celebrated annually, events in the Virginia colony soon took a dire turn: those local Indians long lurking in the woods launched a massive revolt in 1622 . A third of the entire Virginia colony died, including at least nine of the Berkeley Hundred colonists.

To effect the massacre, the Indians approached the colonists during the Easter season and, after being invited into settlements all over the colony by well-meaning Christians who wanted to proselytize to them, fell upon them with muskets and knives and killed as many as possible. The settlement at Berkeley Hundred was destroyed.

While Jamestown survived and the English managed to eventually recover from the blow and wreak their vengeance upon the Indians, the damage done to the Berkeley Hundred was so severe that it fell upon decades of hard times, only recovering fully as it became the seat of the Harrison family in the 1630s and 40s.

But by then, the Thanksgiving tradition had been forgotten. The 1622 massacre and resultant wars with the Indians had not only disrupted the settlement of the Berkeley Hundred, but also brought an end to its Thanksgiving tradition as well. As Washingtonian magazine notes, “For three centuries, Virginia’s first Thanksgiving was lost to history.”¹ It was only reborn in 1958, thanks to the efforts of Sen. John Wicker of Virginia.²

And so Thanksgiving was remembered as a New England tradition rather than a Virginian tradition for all but a few, with President Kennedy having to be corrected in 1962 when he gave full credit for the tradition and celebration to the Massachusetts pilgrims.³

Thanks for reading! As promised, this article was short and sweet. For those who want to read more, here’s last year’s Thanksgiving article:

1. Not a great article on it, but this is from where I got that quote: https://reason.com/2017/11/22/who-really-held-the-first-thanksgiving-i/

2. https://berkeleyplantation.com/first-thanksgiving/

3. https://virginiathanksgivingfestival.net/history