The first people commonly credited with “celebrating Thanksgiving” in what became the United States were the English Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Wampanoag Native Americans, who shared a three-day harvest feast in 1621.

Quick Scoop

Who were the “first” Thanksgiving people?

  • In U.S. tradition, the Pilgrims (Separatist Protestants from England) at Plymouth Colony held a harvest celebration in autumn 1621 after their first successful crop.
  • They were joined by the Wampanoag people, led by Massasoit, who arrived with around 90 men and contributed food such as venison to the feast.
  • This event was later remembered and promoted as the “first Thanksgiving,” even though the people there did not use that name at the time.

Earlier thanksgiving-style celebrations

  • Europeans had already held Christian thanksgiving services in North America, such as a 1578 ceremony with English explorer Martin Frobisher in present-day Canada and Spanish religious services in Florida decades earlier.
  • Many Indigenous nations, including the Wampanoag, had long-standing harvest and thankfulness ceremonies well before Europeans arrived, so “giving thanks” feasts were not new on this land.

How it became the Thanksgiving holiday

  • For centuries, different colonies and states held their own days of thanksgiving for harvests, victories, or safe voyages, rather than one unified national day.
  • In 1863, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a recurring national Thanksgiving Day, helping fix the 1621 Plymouth story at the center of the holiday’s origin myth.

Today’s debate and “who really was first?”

  • Historians point out that if “first Thanksgiving” means the first European-style thanksgiving in North America, candidates include Spanish and English ceremonies from the 1500s and early 1600s.
  • If it means the origin of the modern U.S. Thanksgiving story, then it is the 1621 harvest feast shared by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag that has been elevated—often at the cost of downplaying Indigenous perspectives and later violence.

In short: the famous answer is “Pilgrims and Wampanoag in 1621,” but the deeper history shows many earlier and older thanksgiving traditions on this continent.

TL;DR: The first people usually said to celebrate Thanksgiving were the Pilgrims and Wampanoag at Plymouth in 1621, but Indigenous ceremonies and earlier European thanksgiving services happened long before, and the national holiday story was shaped much later in the 1800s.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.