Like all Puritans, the British pilgrims who landed at Plymouth (Patuxet) in 1620 had once sought to reform the Church of England. They left England first for the Netherlands and then on to the new world. They were separatists. We know them today as the Pilgrims. Click here for a 10-minute video posted on October 31, 2025 by History250 that tells their story.

From Scrubby in northern England, where they met in secret, the separatists fled to Leiden in the Netherlands. Increasingly, however, they feared they might lose their children to the Dutch culture, so they planned to go to America.

With about 100 passengers plus crew members, the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, England in September of 1620. Before they disembarked in the New World, however, they wrote and signed an agreement that we know today as the Mayflower Compact.

Sometime in the fall of 1621, likely in late September, the surviving settlers held a feast. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln set apart the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving and praise to God for the nation to help heal the wounds of the Civil War.