It’s commonly believed that the Pilgrims from the Mayflower held the first Thanksgiving feast. Theirs was undoubtedly the most famous, but not the first. A year before the Pilgrims held their celebrations in Plymouth, a group of settlers at the Berkeley Town and Hundred in Virginia had just disembarked from the ship the Margaret and they established in their founding charter “the day of our ships arrival . . . shall be yearly and perpetually kept as a day of Thanksgiving.”

On this day, December 4, in 1619, the first Thanksgiving day celebration was held in the Berkeley plantation, in Virginia. Seventeen days later, the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, to make their Thanksgiving in November of 1620.

The menu at these first Thanksgiving celebrations would have differed greatly from the Thanksgiving tables of today. No candied yams, no mashed potatoes, no cranberries. The menus would have been heavy on corn and on fowl and venison. Turkeys, plentiful in the colonies, would have likely been a second choice bird after passenger pigeons (noted for their fat at the time) and ducks or other waterfowl. The settlers may have also complemented their feast with fish and eels caught from nearby waters.