Soldiers enjoy Thanksgiving meal in NYC in 1918.

Thanksgiving as an official holiday was born of an event that occurred in the poorer quarters of New York City in 1850, according to the humongous Burrows and Wallace tome, Gotham. The Ladies’ Home Missionary Society held an event in an infamous slum that would eventually lead to President Abraham Lincoln designating Thanksgiving a national holiday. An excerpt:

“In 1850, backed by wealthy contributors like Daniel Drew and Anson G. Phelps, the LHMS opened a Five Points Mission in a rented room diagonally across from the infamous ‘Old Brewery.’ There, under the leadership of the Rev. Louis M. Pease, the ladies ran prayer meetings and Bible study classes, opened a charity day school, sponsored temperance speakers, and went out to comfort the sick. Closely attuned the virtues of publicity, they issued regular accounts of their work–filled with stories of miraculous conversions and deathbed repentances–and on Thanksgiving Day paraded hundreds of scrubbed Sunday school students before benefactors. Then the ladies fed their charges turkey dinners, inaugurating a ritual that would lead, a decade later, to Thanksgiving’s establishment as an official (and feminized) holiday.”