An excavation gives us some amazing hints about this little-know group that actually celebrated Thanksgiving 2 years before the Pilgrims.
This one took place 500 miles south of Plymouth Rock and nearly 2 years earlier. Here, just 30 miles upstream from Jamestown, a little-known group of religious-minded settlers celebrated with prayer their successful voyage from England in December 1619, and pledged to do so annually on the same date.
However, in just three years, this settlers’ community, known as Berkeley Hundred, came to a sudden and bloody end after a deadly attack by Native Americans, part of a larger uprising that nearly wiped out the entire Virginia colony. Eighteenth-century colonists subsequently built an elegant plantation house on the site that still looms over the James. Until now, no seventeenth-century artifacts have ever been found on the thousand-acre property that might point to the location of the original Berkeley Hundred settlement.
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Source: NationalGeographic.com