While there are no precise historical records, it is suggested the practice of ground meat came to America in the latter 1800s with German immigrants, but there is some evidence that a "Hamburg steak" appeared on menus as early as the 1830s.

Whoever brought it over, good old American ingenuity is what resulted in the patty we know today as the hamburger. But of course, in the great tradition of tracing origins for popular icons, there are some four American locations that claim to be the birthplace of the hamburger.

They include Athens, Texas, whose claim to fame is based on a photograph of Old Dave's Hamburger Stand at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, with local verbal recounting of the sandwich having been seen around Athens as far back as the 1880s. Old Dave was local resident Fletcher Davis.

Also in the running for birthing the burger, is Hamburg, New York. whose evidence is also mostly verbal. The city was named for its counterpart in Germany, not the sandwich that appeared in 1885. Two enterprising brothers traveling the fair circuit, sold fried sandwiches cooked over a grill. The content was a mixture of ground pork, split peas, spices and other odds and ends. But while in Hamburg, they ran out of ground pork, and substituted ground beef. The rest, so Hamburg says, is history.

The Lassen family of New Haven, Connecticut, shuns all other claimants, and has some documents to back their story up. For it was in a diner named Louis' Lunch that the hamburger patty was first thrust between two slices of bread and handed to a patron in a hurry. Local history states this was 1895, but the Lassens put the date at 1900.

However, Seymour Wisconsin appears to have the biggest claim, and the biggest hamburgers. Their records pre-date the Hamburg claim by five months, and date back to 1885. One Charlie Nagreen, who also followed the fair circuit, decided to flatten the ground meatballs that were popular snacks, so they wouldn't roll off the slices of bread they were served on. In celebration of this momentous event in their history, the town holds an annual fair to salute the hamburger. In 1989 they set a world record with a whopper that weighed 5,520 lbs. Then when Saco, Montana, topped that with a 6,000 pound patty in 1999, the inhabitants of Seymour ground their teeth, set to work, and took the record back in 2001 with a four ton hamburger.