No single person “discovered” Thanksgiving, because it developed over time from various European and Indigenous traditions rather than being invented or found by one individual.
Early origins
- European colonists in North America, including in what is now Canada and New England, held occasional “days of thanksgiving” to give thanks for safe voyages, military victories, or good harvests, often with church services and feasts.
- Indigenous peoples such as the Wampanoag already had long-standing harvest celebrations and ceremonies of thanks well before Europeans arrived, and these practices strongly shaped later events that became part of the Thanksgiving story.
The famous 1621 feast
- In what is now the United States, the holiday is commonly traced to a three-day harvest feast in 1621 shared by English Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag people, which later writers labeled “the first Thanksgiving.”
- That 1621 gathering was not called Thanksgiving at the time; it was a harvest celebration that later generations retroactively transformed into the symbolic origin of the American Thanksgiving holiday.
Creation of the U.S. holiday
- The idea of a regular national Thanksgiving in the United States was heavily promoted in the 1800s by writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who campaigned for a uniform annual celebration.
- President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day in 1863 during the Civil War, helping fix the tradition as a recurring national holiday, and later presidents continued the practice.
So, Thanksgiving was not “discovered” by one person; it grew from Indigenous harvest traditions, scattered colonial thanksgivings, the 1621 Plymouth–Wampanoag feast, and 19th‑century efforts to establish a national holiday.
