The Burger Battle Is Cooking Now : With Giant Patty, Wisconsin Town Goes for the Record

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 hamburger , singular. And not just any hamburger, but “the world’s biggest 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 hamburg 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).

Meanwhile, Denverites claim title to the first cheeseburger, even erecting a monument to Mr. and Mrs. Louis Ballast who began frying cheese-draped patties 54 years ago at their Humpty Dumpty Barrel Drive-In at 2776 N. Speer Blvd., now the site of a bank.

And McDonald’s has opened its “McMuseum”--a replica of its first fast-food stand, which opened in Des Plaines, Ill., in 1955. Let the record show, too, that White Castle System, a regional chain headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, claims to have pioneered the fast-food burger in 1921 in the form of its tiny square “sliders,” perforated 2 1/2-ounce patties steamed over frying onions at a stand patterned on Chicago’s famous Water Tower but located at 118 W. 1st St. in Wichita, Kan.

But all those claims pale before that of Seymour, Wis., as Home of the Hamburger.

After all, hamburgers account for almost 60% of all sandwiches sold over the counter. They replaced the hot dog as the nation’s most popular fast food even before World War II. And today’s American consumer devours hamburgers at the rate of 30 pounds a year.

However, a Seymour High School curriculum coordinator named Dick Tepp can back up the city’s claim with a stack of newspaper accounts chronicling the life behind the grill of “Hamburger Charley” Nagreen. These accounts, Tepp noted, agree that on Aug. 14, 1885, Charles N. Nagreen, then 15 years old, drove an oxcart onto the grounds of Seymour’s first fair, where he set up a stand and sold ground beef patties to the visitors.

Between the Buns

It seemed just good sales sense to young Nagreen that fair-goers would be more likely to buy his food if it were made easy to carry. So he flattened his meatballs and put them between slices of bread, and even called the resulting sandwiches hamburger s. The name is thought to have been derived, in ethnically conscious Wisconsin, from the raw, chopped meat dish called steak tartare that was brought to this country by immigrants from the German port city of Hamburg.

Nagreen soon became known as Hamburger Charley as he piped his singsong spiel, which one contemporary account set forth as follows:

Hamburger, hamburger, hamburger hot,

With an onion in the middle and a pickle on the top,

Makes your lips go flippity flop.

Come on in, try one order,

Fried in butter, listen to it sputter.

Hamburger Charley was to return to the fair, now the Outagamie County Fair, for 65 years until his death in 1951 at age 81. Over the years, Nagreen’s sales pitches became a good deal more terse, including: “Hey, you skinny rascals, don’t you ever eat?”

Seymour citizens organized Home of the Hamburger Inc. last year to press the town’s claim to fast-food fame. The group emerged after Dave Muench, a community research development agent with University of Wisconsin Extension, suggested that economically sleepy Seymour could capitalize on the potential celebrity of Hamburger Charley, whose fame had begun to degenerate from national history to merely local lore.

In Search of Fame

According to Tom Duffey, former publisher of the Times Press and now a leader of Home of the Hamburger Inc., Saturday’s grilling will be just the beginning. Plans are afoot, he said, to create an annual “national hamburger cook-off” in Seymour, where regional winners would compete in three categories of cook: celebrities, professionals and amateurs.

In the future are plans to build the World Hamburger Hall of Fame and World Hamburger Museum on an 80-acre site. With their “hands-on, interactive games” for children and displays and amusements furnished by major hamburger chains and related product vendors, Duffey said, the hall and museum would soon become a prime tourist attraction.

“We want to have billboards,” he said, “so that when tourists leave Chicago their kids will see them and want to come visit Seymour.”

Several hamburger companies already have agreed to support the venture, Duffey said.

But so far these do not include McDonald’s with its world headquarters just a two-hour drive away in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook. The 34-year-old firm, with its McMuseum and Hamburger University, regards hamburger history with extreme gravity.

“We haven’t cracked McDonald’s--yet,” Duffey conceded, “but they’re newcomers. What do they know?”