Turkey was not on the menu when St. Paul celebrated its first Thanksgiving 175 years ago.

The iconic American game bird was “as scarce as hen’s teeth” in the infant city when residents sat down to their holiday dinners in late 1850, according to a report in the Minnesota Pioneer.

And although it was a more overtly religious occasion than the Thanksgiving we know today, one thing not in short supply was booze.

“Of course turkeys were quite scarce, but whisky was in abundance, and ‘the boys’ whooped it up until very late in the night,” early St. Paul historian Thomas McLean Newson wrote three decades later.

“They were a great deal more thankful for what they had in those days than we are now, even if the whisky was adulterated with strychnine and tobacco.”

It wasn’t until the Civil War that Thanksgiving was established as an annual national holiday, but the tradition of setting aside a day in autumn or early winter to meditate on gratitude was already common in parts of the U.S. by the middle of the 19th century.

Here in Minnesota, a handful of St. Paul clergymen convinced Gov. Alexander Ramsey in 1850 to declare Dec. 26 the state’s inaugural “day of public thanksgiving and praise.”

‘Bells pealed merrily’

The Pioneer reported that “the bells pealed merrily at sunrise and at sunset, and religious exercises were observed in the churches, of a most interesting character.”

Each of the city’s four Christian denominations worshipped separately before gathering at 11 a.m. for a special “union service,” where the Rev. Edward Duffield Neill delivered a sermon that compared the city’s settlers to the Pilgrims who celebrated America’s much mythologized “First Thanksgiving” in 1621.

When the city’s roughly 1,300 inhabitants tucked into their Thanksgiving meals that evening, most dined on venison or grouse they shot themselves, according to a 1925 Pioneer Press article.

Some of the more well-to-do St. Paulites left their cooking to one of the city’s handful of hotels and taverns.

The most sumptuous banquet was reportedly offered by the St. Paul House at Third and Jackson streets, where diners could choose from bear, bison or venison for their main course. Dessert was pie made with cranberries brought to town by Native American women.

In the evening, many younger St. Paulites attended a “magnificent ball” at Mazourka Hall on the upper floor of Abram Elfelt’s dry goods store, which he had “fitted up with transparencies, paintings, pictures and chandeliers, in a style of superb elegance,” according to the next week’s Pioneer.

Some hardy revelers kept the party alive until close to dawn the next day. Fortunately, they had five days to rest up before New Year’s Eve.

“It was a sort of community celebration, this first observation in St. Paul of Thanksgiving day,” the Pioneer Press reminisced in 1925.

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