This week Americans sit down to a big family meal, traditionally connected with the history of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts.
But Virginia has a correction to the Thanksgiving historical record.
Graham Woodlief says it was his ancestor, Captain John Woodlief who actually held the first Thanksgiving. The year was 1619 and the Captain had landed in Virginia.
Part of the instructions in his land grant from the Berkeley Company was to hold an annual service in thanks to God for a safe voyage. “Well it was a simple prayer service in the middle of the winter on the banks of the James River," Graham Woodlief explains. "There was no food, there were no Native Americans.”
That history, though, has long taken a backseat to the story of the Pilgrims. In fact in 1962 President John Kennedy issued a Thanksgiving proclamation that didn’t even mention Virginia. A state senator wrote to the President to correct the record.
The presidential historian wrote right back. “It was due to our unconquerable New England bias on the part of the White House staff and it would be corrected the next proclamation," Woodlief notes. "And it certainly was.”
And so in Kennedy’s 1963 proclamation Virginia’s Thanksgiving was listed before Massachusetts’.
Virginia’s Thanksgiving is December 4th. There will be an official 400th commemoration that afternoon.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
