Virginians claim that they actually held the first Thanksgiving festivities a full two years before the pilgrims of Massachusetts. Captain John Woodlief led a little ship called the Margaret, carrying 38 English settlers from the Berkeley parish in England, to a grassy slope along the James River they then dubbed the Berkeley Plantation in 1619.
The story is that the settlers had been ordered by the London company that sponsored them to commemorate the ship’s arrival with an annual day of Thanksgiving.
Hardly anybody outside Virginia has ever heard of this Thanksgiving, but in 1963 President Kennedy officially recognized the plantation’s claim.
