The Thanksgiving holiday tradition is first traced to a well-recorded 1619 event in Virginia.

The more familiar Thanksgiving precedent is traced to the Pilgrim and Puritans who emigrated from England in the 1620s and 1630s. They brought their previous tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving with them to New England.

The 1621 Plymouth feast and thanksgiving were prompted by a good harvest. The Pilgrims celebrated this with the Wampanoags, a tribe of Native Americans who, along with the last surviving Patuxent, had helped them get through the previous winter by giving them food in that time of scarcity in exchange for an alliance and protection against the rival Narragansett tribe.