On This Day in Arlington (and US) History, November 26, 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the modern Thanksgiving holiday by signing a bill officially establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.
The tradition of celebrating the holiday on Thursday dates back to the early history of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, when post-harvest holidays were celebrated on the weekday regularly set aside as “Lecture Day,” a midweek church meeting where topical sermons were presented. One Thanksgiving story that has been handed down to us is said to have occurred in the autumn of 1621, when Plymouth governor William Bradford invited local Indians to join the Pilgrims in a three-day festival held in gratitude for the bounty of the season.
In 1777 the Continental Congress declared the first national American Thanksgiving following the Patriot victory at Saratoga. In 1789, President George Washington became the first president to proclaim a Thanksgiving holiday, when, at the request of Congress, he proclaimed November 26, a Tuesday, as a day of national thanksgiving for the U.S. Constitution. However, it was not until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln declared that Thanksgiving would fall on the last Thursday of November, that the modern holiday was celebrated nationally.
Virginia history has gotten short shrift in the Thanksgiving story. On December 4, 1619, before Pilgrims reached New England, a group of English settlers led by Captain John Woodlief who commanded a ship named the Margaret, landed in what would become Virginia at what is today the Berkeley Plantation, 24 miles southwest of Richmond. After they arrived on the shores of the James River, the settlers got on their knees and gave thanks for their safe passage. There was no meal, just a genuine prayer to “Thank God!”
