Since January, the lead story in the Times Press, the weekly newspaper serving the Wisconsin town of Seymour since 1886, has focused on, of all things, hamburger. That's \o7 hamburger\f7 , singular. And not just \o7 any\f7 hamburger, but "the world's \o7 biggest\f7 hamburger."
Now, after months of buildup, more than 2 1/2 tons of ground beef will be put to the flame Saturday on a grill the size of a two-car garage.
That event will not just highlight Seymour's Summer Celebration (and, incidentally, feed an expected crowd of 16,000 visitors). The bulging burger also will put Seymour into the Guinness Book of Records, replacing the current heavyweight hamburger champ, Coral Springs, Fla.
And that recognition, civic leaders believe, will help validate their claim that Seymour, a dozen miles southwest of Green Bay, is the world's undisputed Home of the Hamburger. Seymour's 3,000 inhabitants are counting on their enormous hamburger to revitalize the rural economy by drawing free-spending tourist families to a future World Museum of the Hamburger.
Other Burger Bastions
So where's the beef?
Well, for a start, it might be in New Haven, Conn. There, at Louis' Lunch in the shadow of Yale University, owner Ken Lassen maintains that his grandfather produced the first hamburger sandwich at the restaurant he founded in 1895. Lassen still uses the unique vertical griller Grandfather Louis invented in 1898.
Then, there is the claim of Athens, Tex., which points to an Athenian, Fletcher Davis (1864-1941), who is said to have begun serving hamburgers in the 1880s. Davis eventually sold his version--chopped beef served with hot mustard and a slice of Bermuda onion--on the midway of the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, where a reporter from the New York Tribune brought word of the hamburger to his readers.
Then again, Frank Menches is said to have created a hamburger accidentally at New York's Summit County Fair in 1892 after exhausting his supply of pork sausages and turning in desperation to ground beef.
There also was a restaurant in Walla Walla, Wash., that the Oxford English Dictionary credited with having been first to use--a century ago this year--the word \o7 hamburg\f7 to refer to chopped beef (a distinction that the Dictionary of American English traced to an 1884 article in the Boston Journal and that still another found on an 1836 menu from Manhattan's old Delmonico restaurant).
