St. Augustine Record: Thanksgiving Was in St. Augustine, FLorida in 1565

Thursday dinner is 3 months late
ANNE HEYMEN
anne.heymen@staugustinerecord.com
Published Wednesday, November 22, 2006

If you're planning to sit down to a dinner of turkey with all the trimmings Thursday, you're more than three months late with your dinner of thanks.

Not only that, you're planning to serve the wrong foods.

That's the message which historian Dr. Michael Gannon, a former St. Augustine resident now a resident of Gainesville, is trying to get across.

And he's been doing so for a long time.

"Mike Gannon stirred all that up about 25 years ago or so," Dr. Bill Adams, director of the department of heritage tourism for the city of St. Augustine, said in early August. The occasion was just prior to the celebration of the birthday of St. Augustine, Sept. 8, 1565.

And Sept. 8, 1565, says Gannon, is when the first thanksgiving meal was shared in the New World.

Furthermore, says Gannon, that first meal was probably cocido -- a stew made from salted pork and garbanzo beans laced with garlic seasoning and accompanied by hard sea biscuits and red wine.

"That's what the Spaniards likely had to give to the Indians," Gannon said by phone in early August.

Gannon and fellow historian Dr. Eugene Lyons speculated on the menu some years ago, Gannon added.

They based their assumptions on the knowledge of the kind of foods the Spaniards carried on their ships on their voyage to the New World.

"In 1985, it became a national story," Gannon said by phone in August, "and I just finished writing an article for 'Forum,'" (for the November issue) on the first thanksgiving.

In 1985, AP carried stories of Gannon's claim for St. Augustine as the location for the first meal of thanks.

"There were two English thanksgivings of which we have a record," Gannon said in August. "One was Dec. 4, 1619" at Berkeley Plantation near Charles City, Va. Two years later, he continues, "the familiar English Pilgrim Father Thanksgiving" was served. Sept. 8, 1565, in St. Augustine, Gannon adds, a Mass of Thanksgiving was celebrated by Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, fleet chaplain.

And, after Mass, when the Indians, invited by the brother-in-law of Menendez on the admiral's instructions, sat down to their meal of cocido, the Indians may well have contributed their own food, says Gannon.