The Spanish originally celebrated the meal with a feast with Native Americans 60 years before, and even called it "thanksgiving."
According to published reports, a group of Spanish settlers in Florida may have beaten the Pilgrims to the punch by nearly 60 years, some historians say.
The story of the Pilgrims' feast — the one behind all those elementary school plays and corny cartoon specials — is based on an actual meal that English settlers shared with the Wampanoag people to celebrate an autumnal harvest in the fall of 1621 in their newly established settlement of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Yet in 1565, Spanish settlers in Florida held a first Thanksgiving-style feast with local Native Americans.
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and 800 Spanish settlers landed in Spanish La Florida on September 8, 1565, the National Park Service says on its website. There, they established a city called St. Augustine, which still exists today and is the "oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in the United States," according to the town's website.
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