The First Thanksgiving Feast in the New World

A Closer Look at Our Forefathers Harvest Celebration

Nov 6, 2008

Meat and fish were plentiful but what kind of vegetables did the pilgrims and native people share at the first Thanksgiving? Here, we will take a look at what is known.

A feast in the autumn of 1621 shared by the original settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts and the Wampanoag Indians was a celebration of the harvest. This is the feast most people point to as the first Thanksgiving. There was another feast in December of 1619 touted as the first Thanksgiving by many. This one took place at Berkeley Plantation in Virginia.

Another date mentioned is 1623. "The harvest celebration of autumn, 1621, was quite plainly neither a fast day nor a thanksgiving day in the eyes of the Pilgrims. Rather it was a secular celebration...The actual first declared Thanksgiving occurred in 1623, after a providential rain shower saved the colony’s crops. [1]

More Than One Celebration

The fact is, celebrations were held all over the eastern seaboard as new arrivals came on shore, struggled to make a home, plant and harvest food and survive the first few years in a rugged new land. Their feasts would have been very different than the feasts of today. Vegetables, for instance, were not as plentiful as they are today. Early settlers had to grow the vegetables they ate and this meant the seed must be brought across the Atlantic with them on their voyage. Some native foods would have been cultivated, for instance, Indian corn, sunchokes, nuts and berries. This would have taken time; time to discover the new foods and time to plant and harvest them. Native Americans were a great source of knowledge when it came to wild foods. They taught the settlers how to find and collect the wild bounty their new land had to offer.

The first gardens planted by settlers did not produce as well as they had hoped. The soil in New England was very different from the soil in their native England. Squanto, called a faithful Indian, taught the settlers how to add herring (or shad) to the soil as fertilizer and mound the soil up around plants which made a noticeable difference in their crop yields. Settlers still had a long drought, hot summer and early freezing temperatures to suffer but finally brought in a harvest of plenty. By the time they had learned these new lessons, a celebration would have been in order; the harvest celebration.

Many of the heirloom seeds sought by gardeners of today come from plants cultivated from the original seeds brought over by early settlers. As with any type of history, accounts are sometimes blurred from one writing to the next which makes it difficult to pin down exactly which types of seeds were brought over.

Possible Seeds Early Settlers Brought to New England:

Potatoes, a staple at every Thanksgiving dinner today, were not on the menu for early settlers. They had not yet made their way to the shores of America. Potatoes came with Irish immigrants in about 1845.

Jerusalem artichokes, known to Native Americans as sun roots, may have been on the menu. These perennials grew wild along the eastern seaboard and were also cultivated by the native people. The Jerusalem artichoke is not an artichoke at all but a tuber with a nutty flavor. Nutritionally sound, this would have been a good choice for hungry settlers.

[1] "The Pilgrims as People: Understanding the Plymouth Colonists" by James Baker, former Director of Research; Plimoth Plantation website

Interesting Reading:

Giving Thanks Cookbook by Kathleen Curtin, Sandra Oliver and Plimoth Plantation; ISBN-10:1400080576, ISBN-13: 978-1400080571

Squanto and the Pilgrims by Lynn Ceci; Society Journal ,Publisher Springer New York, ISSN 0147-2011, Issue Volume 27, Number 4 / May, 1990 Pages 40-44

Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners by Suzanne Ashworth and Kent Whealy; ISBN-10: 1882424581, ISBN-13: 978-1882424580

The copyright of the article The First Thanksgiving Feast in the New World in Vegetable Gardens is owned by Jacqueline Cross. Permission to republish The First Thanksgiving Feast in the New World in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.