Before the Pilgrims, Floridians celebrated the ‘real’ first Thanksgiving

It’s that time of year when children make cardboard turkeys and draw the Mayflower while we prepare to fill our tables with stuffing and pumpkin pie, the way most imagine the Pilgrims did at the first Thanksgiving in 1621.

But there’s just one catch, according to archaeologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History: The Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving wasn’t the first.

The nation’s real first Thanksgiving took place more than 50 years earlier near the Matanzas River in St. Augustine, Florida, when Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and 800 soldiers, sailors and settlers joined local Native Americans in a feast that followed a Mass of Thanksgiving, according to Kathleen Deagan , distinguished research curator emerita of historical archaeology at the museum, located on the Universi