Next week brings the American Thanksgiving holiday and for most of us a wonderful feast. It is also for me a time when steamboats on the Tombigbee River come to mind. As strange as that combination seems it actually makes perfectly good sense.
As big a role as food plays with Thanksgiving, references to special recipes for Thanksgiving foods did not become common in Southern cookbooks until around 1900. It is then that Thanksgiving menus start appearing and the day which had been considered a day of prayer begins to be referred to as a holiday. Interestingly the celebratory meal was not just a luncheon but included breakfast and supper too.
The two earliest references to Thanksgiving in Columbus I have found are in local newspapers. The November 30, 1838, Southern Argus of Columbus reported that the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire set aside Nov. 29 as a day to be observed as “a day of public Thanksgiving.” Then in 1839 on January 12th, The Columbus Democrat reported that Thanksgiving was celebrated at the “lunatic Asylum in Worcester, Mass, where the Thanksgiving feast consisted of turkey, pumpkin and mince pie followed by a dance.”
President George Washington had first called for “a Day of Publick Thanksgivin” to be held on November 26, 1789, but it was up to individual states to decide whether or not to celebrate it and, if so, on what day. The celebration of Thanksgiving in Mississippi in the early and mid-1800s seemed to be at the whim of the governor. On November 20, 1852 a Columbus newspaper reported that Mississippi would celebrate Thanksgiving day on October 14th. In 1853 the governor of Mississippi set the second Thursday in November as the day to celebrate Thanksgiving. Also in 1853 the Columbus Southern Standard called on Mississippi Governor Foote to officially set aside and “proclaim a day of Thanksgiving Prayer.” However in 1854, 23 states officially celebrated Thanksgiving on Nov. 24, but Mississippi was not one of them and did not officially celebrate it at all.
In 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared that the last Thursday in November be sat aside as a national day of Thanksgiving. In order to add a week to the Christmas shopping season President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 moved the date back to the second to last Thursday in November. Then in 1942 he compromised and set the date as the fourth Thursday in November. It has since remained that date.
A 1903 Billups’ family cookbook from Columbus provides a suggested menu for Thanksgiving. For breakfast there would be grapes, oatmeal, country sausage, scrambled eggs, browned potatoes, griddle cakes, maple syrup and coffee. For dinner (lunch) there should be oysters on the half shell, mutton broth, celery, turkey stuffed with oysters, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, baked squash, boiled onions with cream sauce, peach pickles, Waldorf salad, cheese wafers, mince pie, pudding, nuts, fruit and coffee. Supper was to be light, consisting of cold turkey, tea biscuits, cottage cheese, sweet tomato pickles, thanksgiving cake, fruit and tea.
Now what did steamboats have to do with all of this? November was normally the month when the Tombigbee became high enough for steamboats to travel upstream from Mobile to Columbus. It was also generally cool enough that the boats could bring sacks of oysters up river from Mobile. With oysters arriving in late November and December they became a traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas food along the river. Just as oysters were an important part of the 1903 Thanksgiving menu, many local people still think that a proper holiday dressing is oyster dressing. In the late 1800s the quantity of oysters brought into Columbus by steam boat was so large that the city began using the discarded oyster shells to fill pot holes in the streets.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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