The Better Burger Battle

American cuisine is identified around the world with this sandwich. We have taken the idea of placing broiled, fried or even steamed ground beef between bread or buns with a bewildering array of condiments to the point where the hamburger may be the icon of American food. In the Northeast, except for the steamed cheeseburger (see below), there are no clear regions of how the hamburger is treated but two of the claimants to the throne of the birthplace of this sandwich are in the region so it needs to be included.

In 1904 Davis and his wife went to the St. Louis World's Fair either on his own or the townspeople took up a collection to send him (there is no evidence for that claim, however). Whoever paid for the trip, he was there since a reporter for the New York Tribune wrote from the fair of a new sandwich called a hamburger, "the innovation of a food vendor on the pike." The reporter did not name the vendor but Athens resident Clint Murchison said that his grandfather had strong memories of the sandwich in the 1880s but remembered the innovator only as "Old Dave." Murchison also had a large photograph of the midway at the 1904 fair with "Old Dave's Hamburger Stand" marked apparently by his grandfather. When Davis returned from the fair there were already several cafes in Athens serving the sandwich and he went back to firing pots in the Miller pottery works. Tolbert's investigation proved that "Old Dave" was Fletcher Davis from Athens (Tolbert 1983).

All the claims of primacy have to deal with the question of how the name was applied to the sandwich as well as the sandwich itself. The story from Athens is that in town the sandwich had no name but that it was given the name "hamburger" at the fair. The Germans of St. Louis were principally from southern Germany and enjoyed putting down northern Germans who, according to them, were large eaters of ground meat,   particularly raw. "So the St. Louis Germans may have named the sandwich hamburger as a derisive gesture toward the barbaric, ground-meat gobblers in the city of Hamburg." (Kindree Miller, nephew of Fletch Davis, reported in Tolbert's Texas).

The promotional material for the 1991 hamburger festival in Athens stated that the McDonald's Institute had proclaimed that town the birthplace of the hamburger. While the McDonalds Corporation does recognize the St. Louis World's Fair, 1904, as the place where the first hamburger was served, the archives division was unable to find any reference to the study cited by the Athens newspaper (Wizniuk 1998). The person in charge of the hamburger festival in Seymour, WI,, remembers the "study" as an opportunity for school children to vote for the place of origin and recalls that the Athens, TX, area seemed to be better organized to get out the vote. 

Hamburg, NY

The claim of Hamburg, NY, also relies heavily on oral history written down long after the event. Two brothers, Charles and Frank Menches from Stark County, OH, were travelling a circuit of fairs, race meetings, and farmers' picnics in the early 1880s. They sold sandwiches using a gasoline stove to fry the meat. The popular sandwiches at these events were pork sausage, fried egg, fried liverwurst, fried mush and fried peas porridge. The brothers decided to focus on the pork sausage sandwich. In 1885 while selling at the Erie County, NY, fair, also known as the Hamburg Fair for the county seat, they ran out of pork sausage.

At this point the story gets a little confusing because two sources make different claims. Kunzog, who talked with Frank Menches about this in the 1920s, says that when they ran out of sausage they approached a Hamburg butcher, Andrew Klein, who operated a slaughter house and meat market. He was unable to furnish pork to them and, since the weather was very hot,  he did not want to do any butchering for a small order. So he offered to chop up ten pounds of beef.

After forming patties and frying them they decided that a little brown sugar would bring out the flavor. The legend contends that the name was given for the town of Hamburg, NY, and had nothing to do with the penchant for the people of Hamburg to eat ground or finely chopped meat, as claimed in the Athens, TX, story.

A local historian, Joseph Streamer, writing an "Out of the Past" column in a local newspaper, The Sun, claimed that the brothers had gotten the meat from Stein's  market, not Kleins,  but in another column he noted that Stein had sold the market in 1874; at that time Franch Menches would have been only eleven years old. With the similarity of "Stein" and "Klein" it is easy to see how one could get confused but it sheds some doubt on the claim. Streamer wrote approximately 200 of the small pieces in the paper and in the one dealing with Stein's market no mention was made of the hamburger invention. Nor do any of the centennial, sesquicentennial or 175th anniversary volumes of Hamburg's history. The lack of mention of the invention of the hamburger in the "official" histories of some of these communities is consistent; all the evidence seems to come from interviews long after the event.

New Haven, CT

Several sources, mostly Connecticut based, make a claim that the sandwich was invented in 1895 in New Haven, CT. Local newspaper accounts say that Louis Lassen, on emigrating from Denmark in 1880, sold butter and eggs and then leased a lunch wagon in 1895. He first specialized in a steak sandwich with thin slices of meat. He would take the trimmings home and grind them up to serve as patties or meat loaf to his family. Although some of the sources claim 1895 as the date for the sandwich, the Lassen family usually says 1900. Once when confronted with the Athens, TX, claim for Uncle Fletch Davis, Kenneth Lassen, Louis' grandson, was quoted as saying, "We have signed, dated and notarized affadavits saying we served the first hamburger sandwiches in 1900. Other people may have been serving the steak but there's a big difference between a hamburger steak and a hamburger sandwich." (Lassen quoted in Review Staff 1991). The sandwich was sold between pieces of bread and soon became the bulk of Lassen's lunch business.

Louis' Lunch is still selling their hamburgers from a small brick building in New Haven.  The sandwich is grilled vertically in antique gas grills and served between pieces of toast rather than a bun.

Seymour, WI

The Seymour story has Charlie Nagreen serving the world's first hamburger at the Seymour Fair of 1885, some five months before the Hamburg claim. "Hamburger" Charlie supposedly decided to flatten a meatball and place it between slices of bread. Speaking to the Appleton (WI) Post Crescent in 1947, Nagreen claims to have originated the use of the word also. The program printed for the "Home of the Hamburger Celebration" in 1989 contained a reprinted account of the first Seymour Fair in 1885 and there was no mention Nagreen's invention (Anon. 1989).

It is clear from the Seymour story, however, that Charlie Nagreen did continue to make hamburgers and was rather well known on the local fair circuit until he was eighty years old. He was a busy entrepeneur; his daughter said he also peddled Christmas trees, party costumes, popcorn, fireworks and ice cream and also played in Nagreen's Orchestra. The descriptions of Nagreen written by people who knew him all spoke of his flair for promotion. "Hamburger Charlie" passed away in 1951 still claiming to be the first inventor of the hamburger.

Seymour has the most elaborate celebration and infrastructure of hamburger history in the Hamburger Hall of Fame (they plan to build a hamburger-shaped building) and an annual one day Burger Fest. In 1989 the world's largest hamburger (5,520 pounds) was served at the festival. There have been no challenges to the record so the annual big burger now is only around 1,000 pounds. This festival also has several competiive events around hamburgers - the hamburger relay and the ketchup slide.