SEYMOUR, WI (WTAQ) — Seymour, Wisconsin touts itself as the “Home of the Hamburger”, and they celebrated that name openly and proudly over the weekend at Seymour Burgerfest, now back to its full pre-pandemic splendor after drastically scaling back last year.
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As the legend goes, ‘Hamburger’ Charlie Nagreen was a 15-year-old meatball vendor at the Seymour Fair in 1885, and it was necessity that was the mother of invention.
“He realized that the meatballs were sliding off of the plates as people were walking amongst the festival, so he had an idea: pack that meatball down into a patty, serve it between two slices of bread, and serve it as a hamburger,” says Hamburger Charlie–or at least the latest one.
Charlie Nagreen’s tradition and characteristic garb are replicated by a stand-in even today in Seymour, 70 years after Charlie himself passed away in 1951.
‘Hamburger Charlie’ displays a cut of the giant hamburger to the hungry audience at the Seymour Burgerfest in Seymour, Wi on August 14th, 2021. (Eating Normal)
A few other people through history claim to have invented the burger, but in Seymour, the answer is easy. In fact, it’s barely even a question.
“This is it. It’s truly the original hamburger. This is where it was,” says volunteer burgermaster Mark Groeschel. “Don’t let anybody fool you.”
At his tent, they sell thousands of hamburgers a year. That is, except for last year. Last year, the event still had the trademark parade and car show, but during the pandemic they tried to scale back the parts of the event with heavy human contact.
That meant the burgers, the ketchup slide (which is exactly what it sounds like–a slip and slide with ketchup), the bounce houses, and the vendors didn’t happen. It was like a bowl of Booyah, but hold the chicken and remove the soup. It was like a crustless pizza without the cheese. It was a burger-less Burgerfest. Groeschel was delighted that things were back to normal this year.
“It’s rewarding,” Groeschel says. “To see people enjoying themselves again and getting back to…a new normal.”
There was one burger consumed during the pandemic year. The cooking of the traditional 200 lb pound hamburger went on as planned. Usually shared with the public, last year essential workers and first responders got the burger delivered to them. This year, things were back to normal. Jim Campbell is the guy who knows what it takes to cook a 200 lb hamburger.
“Time and some muscle,” Campbell laughed. “It’s pretty easy to mix it up, but to have it done right–it has to taste like Charlie’s original burger, which was a meatball.”
That means it’s a little different than your typical burger.
“Meatballs had egg and all sorts of other stuff in them,” said Campbell. “So that’s what we do. We make sure it’s as close to the original as possible.”
Assembling the burger is a precision act. It takes four men to move and flip the gargantuan burger–which is cooked in a special grill built just for the occasion. It’s then assembled on a giant bun with nearly a hundred slices of cheese on top with ketchup, mustard, and pickles–just the way the man himself made it back in 1885. Chunks are then cut off of the burger and given away to the crowd who delight in a little slice of culinary history that you can only get in this small Outagamie County town of a little over 3,000 people.
You can take it from me, who ate quite a bit: history is delicious.
