There are some foods so synonymous with the U.S. that it’s hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist, like apple pie, sliced bread or frozen pizza, for instance.
There’s also the cheeseburger, one of America’s most ubiquitous foods and probably its most sought-after fast food offering.
But the origins of the cheeseburger are easy to track. It’s generally agreed that Lionel Sternberger, a teenager in Pasadena, California, was the first to put cheese on a hamburger while working at his father’s restaurant, The Rite Spot, in 1924. Why he added the cheese is contested, but Sternberger is still viewed as the cheeseburger’s inventor.
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The originator of the hamburger, though, is more hotly contested: Four cities in the U.S. claim the cookout star was invented by one of their residents.
One story connects the hamburger’s roots to Athens, Texas. There, it’s said that Fletcher Davis, fondly known as “Uncle Fletch,” first served hamburgers from a food stand. The burger’s popularity prompted Athens residents to pool their funds and send Uncle Fletch and his hamburgers to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Nexstar’s KETK reports. However, a lack of archival evidence pokes some holes in this tale.
Others point to New Haven, Connecticut as the home of the burger. Louis Lassen, who owned Louis’ Lunch, reportedly created the sandwich when a customer asked for a meal to go in 1900, according to Nexstar’s WTNH.
“In an instant, Louis placed his own blend of ground steak trimmings between two slices of toast and sent the gentleman on his way,” the restaurant, which is still open today, explains on its website. Louis’ Lunch says it “continues to serve the original hamburger, just as it was first prepared in 1895” when the spot opened.
Congressional records included in the Library of Congress give New Haven and Lassen the hamburger-inventing crown over Athens’ Uncle Fletch, but records show the hamburger was on the food scene years earlier — and some 800 miles away in Wisconsin, according to one account.
Locals in Seymour, Wisconsin — the home of the Hamburger Hall of Fame — say 15-year-old Charlie Nagreen was selling meatballs at the Outagamie County Fair in Seymour in 1885. A lack of sales led Nagreen to smash the meatballs and put them between two pieces of bread, Hamburger Hall of Fame officials claim.
Nagreen allegedly chose to call his creation a hamburger, perhaps a reference to an already-popular food in the area, ground beefsteak, which got its own name from its connections to Hamburg, Germany. Nagreen earned his own similar name: “Hamburger Charlie.”
Unfortunately, while Seymour may have some weight in the fight, Christopher Carosa, who explored the history of the hamburger for his book “Hamburger Dreams,” suggests another city may be the burger’s true home.
As legend has it, Charles and Frank Menches, brothers from Canton, Ohio, were at the Erie County Fair in New York in 1885. They were serving sausage patties at the festival — which was held in Hamburg, New York — but ran out, Heather Williams of Juicy Burger Bar told Nexstar’s WIVB in 2019. The Menches tried to get more pork from the butcher but had to settle for ground beef.
Because they were in Hamburg, they decided to name their invention a “hamburger.”
And if it’s any consolation for Seymour, the Erie County Fair happened only a month before the Nagreen debuted his sandwich, Carosa told Nexstar’s WGN Radio in 2024.
