When the first settlers arrived in Jamestown in April 1607 and raised a cross at Cape Henry, claiming the land for England, they may have had a thanksgiving predating their first known observance in 1619. In that year, Berkeley Hundred was settled, one of a number of plantations granted by the Virginia Co. of London to its stockholders.

According to the History Channel, the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts in November of 1621. While the traditional story says the Pilgrims shared a feast with the nearby Indigenous peoples of the Wampanoag tribe, first hand accounts and modern historians tell a different story.