Did the First Thanksgiving Actually Occur in Florida?

By Joe Marzo

When Americans picture the First Thanksgiving, they usually think of Pilgrims and Wampanoag gathered around a long wooden table in the cool New England autumn of 1621. The image has become a national myth—an origin story built around gratitude, peace, and the birth of an American tradition. But that story leaves something important out. The real first Thanksgiving happened fifty-six years earlier, not in Massachusetts but on the sandy shores of Florida.

A Different Beginning

In 1565, Spanish Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sailed into the harbor of what we now call St. Augustine with hundreds of soldiers, settlers, and priests. They had survived hurricanes, hunger, and the threat of attack from French forces. When they finally stepped onto Florida soil on September 8, they did not build a fort or raise a flag first. They prayed.

Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, the expedition’s chaplain, held a Catholic Mass of Thanksgiving. Menéndez knelt in the sand, kissed a wooden cross, and thanked God for their safe arrival. The Timucua people, who lived nearby, watched as the ceremony unfolded. When the prayers ended, Menéndez invited them to join the Spaniards in a meal.

The Feast on Florida Soil

There were no tables, no silver goblets, no roasted turkeys. The meal took place outdoors on the edge of the bay, under a sky heavy with salt air and sunlight. The Spaniards shared what they had brought from their ships—salted pork, garbanzo beans, hard bread called ship’s biscuit, and red wine from their stores. The Timucua may have offered local foods: roasted fish, oysters, maize, beans, and wild game from the forests around them.

It was not a feast of plenty but a simple act of fellowship and survival. Imagine the scene: soldiers in metal armor sitting beside native fishermen, priests in black robes offering wine to men who had never tasted it before, the mingling of languages and customs over a shared meal. The Spanish chronicler recorded that the Timucua “imitated all they saw done,” a sign of mutual curiosity and cautious peace.

That gathering, held on the sands of St. Augustine, was the first recorded communal meal between Europeans and Native Americans in what would become the United States. It was also the first act of formal thanksgiving on this continent.

A Different Kind of Thanksgiving

Unlike the New England story told in schoolrooms, this was not a harvest celebration. It was a religious moment, an offering of thanks for safe passage across the ocean and a plea for stability in a new land. The people who took part were not farmers celebrating abundance but survivors giving thanks for life itself.

The Florida Thanksgiving reflected the world of the sixteenth century—a world of exploration, empire, and faith. It brought together Catholic Spaniards and Indigenous Floridians under the shadow of colonization, a meeting of two civilizations that would soon be entangled in conquest and tragedy. Yet on that day, for a brief moment, they shared food and gratitude on the same ground.

Why It Was Forgotten

The story of Menéndez and Father López faded as English power grew. The Pilgrim story fit better with the identity the young United States wanted to create—one rooted in Protestant New England, not Catholic Florida. By the time the first national Thanksgiving holiday was proclaimed, the Spanish Mass on Florida’s coast had been almost completely erased from the public memory.

Remembering the Real Thanksgiving

Today, visitors to St. Augustine can stand at the Mission Nombre de Dios, where a massive cross marks the site of that first Mass. The marshes and oaks around the area still feel timeless, echoing the moment when two worlds met in a shared act of faith and gratitude.

The first Thanksgiving did not take place around a table in the autumn cold. It happened on a humid September day, on Florida soil, where Spanish sailors and Timucua hunters shared what little they had and gave thanks for survival. It was not the beginning of a holiday, but it was the beginning of something far deeper—the blending of cultures, the crossing of oceans, and the first flicker of what would become the American story.

Sources:

• National Park Service, The First Thanksgiving at St. Augustine

• Michael Gannon, The Cross in the Sand (University of Florida Press)

• Florida Historical Society Archives

• St. Augustine Historical Society