We Do Concede That Texas Gave Us Our Dumbest President

The city of Athens, Texas, claims to have made America's first hamburger sandwich. When I spoke to the assistant chief of police, Rodney Williams, last week, he told me that there's even a plaque in the town square backing up that assertion.

Nobody really minded such presumptuousness until just last week, when a state legislator, Betty Brown, introduced a resolution making the claim official.

As all us Easterners know, the first hamburger sandwich was made at Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut. In fact, Louis' Lunch is still in the hamburger business, flame-broiling burgers in a weird vertical contraption and placing the cooked meat between two pieces of toast.

Life would have gone on nicely, everybody believing what they wanted to believe, if Brown hadn't made such a big deal over the Athens claim. I thought maybe it had to do with her being made chairman of budget oversight for the state's Agriculture & Livestock Committee, but her office said representatives of the city of Athens had come to her.

Now, it's pretty clear that nobody in this country invented the plain old hamburger patty. That goes back nearly a thousand years, to the creation of steak tartare.

And it's just as clear that nobody in this country cooked the first hamburger patty. Meat plus fire is a pretty basic concept, and somebody came up with the idea long before chopped meat found its way to North America.

So the best we can do in America is claim credit for the addition of bread. So which is it, Texas or Connecticut?

The answer: probably neither.

Most likely, the stupendous event occurred in the 1880s at either the Outagamie (Wisconsin) County Fair or the Erie (New York) County Fair—which, by the way, took place in Hamburg, New York.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, would like to us to believe that the first burger on a bun was prepared on a farm outside the city in 1891—it passed a state proclaimation to that effect, as a matter of fact.

Louis' Lunch didn't make its first burger sandwich until 1900. And it seems that Fletch Davis, who ran a lunch counter in Athens around the turn of the century, might also have come along a tad late. He's supposed to have created a sensation at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair by dishing out a burger between slices of bread. Indeed, a fellow with a stand did exactly that, but nobody is absolutely certain it was Fletch. And even if it were, it looks like he might not have been the first to come up with the idea.

It seems that neither Texas nor Connecticut is the home of the original hamburger sandwich.

By the way, if it's any comfort, it's clear that the first cheeseburger was made in California.