The burger is back. That’s right folks – and I’m not talking about the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. The Rutland griddle is back in its glory with a fresh coat of paint after spending most of 2024 as a plain black canvas. The first time the grill was painted was in 1985 when one side of the grill was erected at Sanderson Field, and it has been repainted several times. The Rutland Community Club had been working with a local printer to make a canvas to cover the grill as a more permanent solution, but that option fell through. The Community Club found a rostered artist with the ND Council on the Arts who was available to do the work. Marcus Tracy, a visual artist, muralist and teaching artist, spent only a few days in Rutland to complete the burger painting.
The Rutland grill at Sanderson Field is one-half of the skillet used to fry the (then) World’s Largest Hamburger in 1982. Each half of the skillet weighed more than a ton and had 201 square feet of grill space. The hamburger itself was 2½” thick and weighed 3,591 lbs. (raw). A homemade burner was used to cook the meat, and it was rolled flat with a 20-ft rolling pin that was also made by Rutland residents. Turning the burger was not a simple job. An identical plate was lowered by crane to the top of the burger, secured, and the burger was turned by crane and the upper plate removed. It took about two and one-half hours to cook the burger that was served to nearly 10,000 people. Be sure to check out the Rutland Centennial video on the City of Rutland, ND, YouTube channel. The burger is featured at about 13:20 in the video feed.
On July 7, 1982, the Guinness Book of Records of London awarded a Record Certificate stating that the “Rutland Community Club of Rutland, North Dakota, USA did break the Largest Beefburger record with a weight of 3,591 lbs. and diameter 16 feet.” The 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, p.325, still listed the Largest Hamburger (made of beef) on record of 3,020 lb. served in 13,083 portions in City Park, Towner, “Cattle Capitol of North Dakota” on June 18, 1981. However, in the Newly Verified Records section at the end of the book listed the “Largest Hamburger. A weight of 3,591 lb was registered for a hamburger 16 ft in diameter and 2½ in thick, made by the Community Club of Rutland, ND.”
There have been other hamburger records since then and even one flipped hamburger in Coral Springs, Florida, in 1988 when they cooked a 5,100 lb. burger on a 40-foot grill (comprised of 8-ft. sections) and firefighters used a crane to turn it one piece at a time onto smaller grills. That event was BYOB (bring your own buns). In my opinion, if they had a category for a flipped hamburger, Rutland would still hold the record!
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