Athens, Greece, is the birthplace of Western civilization, and Athens, Texas, is the cradle of culinary burgerdom.
That’s how the story goes, anyway.
What is certain about the genesis of the “hamburger sandwich,” as it was first called, is that it began appearing at county fairs and mobile lunch carts between 1885 and 1904. But cooks from Canton, Ohio; Seymour, Wisconsin; New Haven, Connecticut; and Hamburg, Germany have all laid claim to its invention.
The true father of the hamburger is so contested that a slew of journalists have fact-checked and poked holes in their peers’ work in attempts to lay claim to the truth. Frank X. Tolbert at The Dallas Morning News deduced in a 1983 column that Fletcher Davis, who allegedly served ground beef on Texas toast at a café in Athens, was the first official hamburger vendor at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. His research was later corroborated by McDonald’s Hamburger University, a Dairy Queen documentary, and a resolution by the Texas State Legislature in 2007, declaring Athens the “Home of the Hamburger.”
The resolution miffed burger enthusiast and Grub Street editor, Joshua Ozersky, who after combing through New York Tribune archives, wrote in a 2007 Los Angeles Times story that there was “no documentary evidence for Texas’ claim at all.” Texas Monthly editor Gary Cartwright also tried to get to the bottom of it two years later when he went to Athens to interview Uncle Fletch’s descendants. His conclusion: “Athens’ claim is as good and maybe better than any of the others.”
An uncontested fact in Ozersky’s opus, The Hamburger: A History, is White Castle co-founder Walter Anderson, from Wichita, Kansas, and his partner E.W. “Billy” Ingram deserve credit for inventing the culture around America’s sandwich. After concerns over the hygiene of ground beef, White Castle convinced the public that hamburgers were a healthy meal by the 1920s. Three decades later, Harmon Dobson added to that bovine-touting dialogue when he spawned a Texas icon: Whataburger No. 1 in Corpus Christi. The rest is fast food history.
