page_title: Plymouth Colony
section_title: Thanksgiving
hierarchical_section_title: Plymouth Colony / Legacy / Thanksgiving
caption_attribution_description: English: September 1863 letter from editor Sarah Josepha Hale to President Abraham Lincoln discussing the need for a national Thanksgiving holiday.
context_page_description: Plymouth Colony was an English colonial venture in America from 1620 to 1691 at a location that had previously been surveyed and named by Captain John Smith. The settlement served as the capital of the colony and developed as the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. At its height, Plymouth Colony occupied most of the southeastern portion of Massachusetts.
  Plymouth Colony was founded by a group of Puritan Separatists initially known as the Brownist Emigration, who came to be known as the Pilgrims. It was the second successful colony to be founded by the English in America after Jamestown in Virginia, and it was the first permanent English settlement in the New England region. The colony established a treaty with Wampanoag Chief Massasoit which helped to ensure its success; in this, they were aided by Squanto, a member of the Patuxet tribe. Plymouth played a central role in King Philip's War, one of several Indian Wars, but the colony was ultimately merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other territories in 1691 to form the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
  Despite the colony's relatively short existence, Plymouth holds a special role in American history.
context_section_description: Each year, the United States celebrates a holiday known as Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is a federal holiday and frequently involves a family gathering with a large feast, traditionally featuring a turkey. Civic recognitions of the holiday typically include parades and football games. The holiday is meant to honor the First Thanksgiving, which was a harvest feast held in Plymouth in 1621, as first recorded in the book New England's Memorial by Nathaniel Morton, secretary of Plymouth Colony and nephew of Governor William Bradford.
  The annual Thanksgiving holiday is a fairly recent creation. Throughout the early 19th century, the U.S. government had declared a particular day as a national day of Thanksgiving, but these were one-time declarations meant to celebrate a significant event, such as victory in a battle. The northeastern states began adopting an annual day of Thanksgiving in November shortly after the end of the War of 1812. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Boston's Ladies' Magazine, wrote editorials beginning in 1827 which called for the nationwide expansion of this annual day of thanksgiving to commemorate the Pilgrim's first harvest feast. After nearly 40 years, Abraham Lincoln declared the first modern Thanksgiving to fall on the last Thursday in November in 1863. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress ultimately moved it to the fourth Thursday in November. After some sparring as to the date, the holiday was recognized by Congress as an official federal holiday in 1941.
  Some of the modern traditions which have developed alongside the Thanksgiving holiday are the National Football League's Thanksgiving Day games and the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City.
caption: 1863 letter from Sarah Josepha Hale to President Abraham Lincoln discussing the creation of a Thanksgiving holiday
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