Now you have one more reason to visit Wisconsin. Besides coming to see the Green Bay Packers play, tasting the best cheese in the country, and visiting the world’s largest music festival you can now sink your teeth into a culinary classic made in a place that will soon be known as the official “Home of the Hamburger.”
Last summer I wrote a blog about Seymour, Wisconsin’s annual Burger Fest. The small northeast Wisconsin city prides itself in showing off its burger lore. Seymour is home to the “Hamburger Hall of Fame,” a makeshift museum filled with hamburger paraphernalia. And it is also the site where the world’s largest burger (weighing in at a whopping 5,220 pounds) was grilled up a few years back. To this day, that burger remains in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Last week, Wisconsin state lawmakers served up a proclamation stating that Charles “Hamburger Charlie” Nagreen of Seymour started calling ground beef patties in a bun, hamburgers, in 1885. According to one legislator, Nagreen “was doing meatballs on a stick and decided to flatten them out and put them between two pieces of bread so people could walk around the fair and eat the hamburger.”
The resolution comes after a round of vicious burger wars. For years Akron, Ohio, Athens, Texas, and New Haven, Connecticut, (along with Seymour) all claimed to be the burger’s birthplace. The skirmish was put to the public last year when a panel of judges at the National Hamburger Festival in Akron, Ohio, put the issue to an online vote and Seymour won with nearly 40 percent.
Wisconsin legislators hope that the resolution will put the subject to rest. As of late last week the resolution regarding Nagreen’s meaty masterpiece advanced to the state Senate. Let’s hope it passes before Burger Fest activities get under way in the city this August.
For those of you interested in attending the city’s annual Burger Fest. Seymour is located 17 miles west of Green Bay and about 90 minutes north of Milwaukee. The community is home to about 3,500 residents and also hosts the Outagamie County Fair each July, which attracts about 80,000 visitors to the area.
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