We think of Thanksgiving as having roots back to Massachusetts colonists and pilgrim people in buckled hats sitting with feather-wearing Indigenous natives, but that’s a much later overlay.
Canada has a Thanksgiving in October, and like most western nations, that observance is pretty explicitly tied to traditional harvest celebrations, as the crops come in and people settle in for the long winter. The U.S. Thanksgiving obviously carries a fair amount of that imagery to the family meal menu and decorations, cornucopias stuffed to overflowing with various gourds and squashes, nuts and grains.
But our fourth Thursday of November Thanksgiving only dates to 1941, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to clear up when the holiday would fall in the month. The history ties back to October 3, 1863 and a presidential proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln, but drafted by Secretary of State William Seward, which calls for “my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.”
Since the month can have either four or five Thursdays, depending, it took a century for Americans to nail down Thanksgiving as we do it now. Up to the Civil War, though, we had harvest celebrations around the country; it was the political need to call the country as a whole together during that conflict which gave rise to the observance of Thanksgiving as we know it today, as a national commemoration on a single date.
Much of it was also about a look back, to spices and flavors and scents which reminded people of how things once were. The whole panoply of “pumpkin spice” is a mix of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, mace and allspice, a mystic chord of memory more than a flavor combination we use all year ‘round.
Wild turkeys were, for most of the country even in 1863, a bit of a call-back in their own right. Bushnell’s 1889 “History of Granville” mentions how in early days “Wild turkeys were so plentiful as to become a pest to the crops… When they began to sow, there are instances where the sower set down his wheat to club back the turkeys.” They were so numerous that “Deacon David Thomas killed seven with two shots, having a shot gun, and getting the turkeys in a row as they sat on the fence.”
The pioneer accounts go on to note “Old Mr. Hoover had the name of killing the largest in the colony. When dressed, it weighed thirty-eight pounds. Mr. Ethan Bancroft shot several that weighed thirty-six pounds.”
There’s a distinct impression from early historians like Bushnell and Doddridge that the first generations got heartily sick of wild turkey, and moved on to domesticated chickens and corn-fed beef willingly enough. But as local legend Ellen Hayes wrote in her 1920 “Wild Turkeys and Tallow Candles” about growing up in Granville during the 1840s and 1850s, wild turkeys were the go-to main course for rich and poor alike, until they were not: “…there were too many shot-guns, too many ever-enlarging bare spots where a strange new enemy strewed grain but carried a club. The turkey was of the wilderness and in a few decades he was gone from a habitat that was no longer his unmolested home.”
Before that day came, though, Hayes recounts that with “Bread and meat accounted for, luxuries were found in maple sugar, nuts, dried wild grapes and wild cherries, and, in their season, blackberries, mulberries and elderberries, — together with cranberries which friendly Indians brought in for sale. Finally, when the young apple-trees began to bear, the pioneer’s table called for nobody’s pity.”
Their menu from the hills around Licking County then sounds very like the kinds of tastes we associate with Thanksgiving today. How and when turkeys became one of those fond remembrances as the feast became a tradition is not certain, but one can suspect turkey farmers had something to do with it. Even so, they do represent a central part of the fall feasts behind Lincoln and Seward’s establishment of a national Thanksgiving on a November Thursday.
In these traditions, from food selections to the imagery we privilege to mark Thanksgiving, there’s an overarching purpose which we can link to Ellen Hayes and her book’s dedication: “That the future may be linked with the past.”
A past which we can see more clearly, through close attention to the sources of the foods we look forward to sharing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller and preacher in central Ohio.