The Harvest of Sixteen Twenty-One

In the autumn of sixteen twenty one, after the Plymouth colony's first successful corn harvest, the colonists held a three-day celebration that is now considered the ancestor of American Thanksgiving, though it was not called that at the time, and the holiday as Americans know it would not be standardized for more than two centuries. What we know about the feast comes mainly from a letter by the colonist Edward Winslow, who described the settlers firing muskets in celebration and inviting Wampanoag people to join them. Some ninety Wampanoag men came, joining the roughly fifty surviving colonists.

The Wampanoag brought five deer. The menu almost certainly included wild fowl, fish, and shellfish along with corn dishes. It probably did not include pie, potatoes, or cranberry sauce in any form recognizable today.

The gathering was as much a diplomatic event as a harvest feast, an extension of the peace treaty that the two communities had established earlier that spring. The Pilgrim story was rescued from relative obscurity in the early nineteenth century, when American writers searching for national origin myths elevated the Plymouth colonists into a new founding narrative. In eighteen sixty three, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, connecting the observance to the Pilgrim story.

The three-day gathering in sixteen twenty one was real. The mythology that grew up around it, with its imagery of joined tables and shared plenty, is largely a later American invention.