HANSON GREGORY, CREATOR OF ... NOTHING?

This is Capt. Hanson Crockett Gregory, of Camden township, Maine. He's famous for becoming the area's youngest sea captain by age 19, which would have been in 1851.

But four years before, Gregory may have given the world a special gift — one for which he should be remembered forever. Gregory's mother, Elizabeth, sent her young man to sea with a healthy supply of deep-fried snack food. Fried pastries were popular at the time in New England: Bismarcks, long johns, crullers, beignets and fried cakes. Elizabeth's recipe included ingredients like nutmeg, cinnamon and even lemon rinds.

Elizabeth's intent was for a) the food to keep for a while at sea, and b) to be dunked in hot black coffee or tea.

The problem was that these doughy lumps would sometimes not get fully cooked in the center. So she began filling the centers with hazelnuts or walnuts. Elizabeth called these little lumps doughnuts. The most often-told version of the story says that 15-year-old Gregory would impale the snacks on the handles of the ship's wheel. Which is admittedly ludicrous to begin with. And not very sanitary.

A smarter version of the story — and documented in a number of books over the years — states that Gregory had a tinsman create a round cutter that would allow Elizabeth to cut out the center of her doughnuts, which would eliminate both the need for nuts in the center and the problem with the centers not fully cooking.

But because nothing is easy when it comes to history, Capt. Gregory — in an interview with the Washington Post in 1916 — gave a third version of the story of the creation of the big nothing at the center of his mom's doughnuts. Gregory told the Post that his mother's doughnuts were a little too oily and greasy. So much so that they gave him indigestion. “They used to fry all right around the edges,” Gregory told the Post, “but when you had the edges done the insides was all raw dough. And the twisters used to sop up all the grease just where they bent, and they were tough on the digestion.

“‘Well,' I saws to myself, ‘why wouldn't a space inside solve the difficulty?'”

The internet fact-checking site Snopes did a deep dive on the topic in 2021. While Snopes can't prove the Post version of the story wrong, at least the timing checks out with the earliest mentions of “doughnuts” and “donuts” in newspapers in Maine in 1861. We'll probably never know the hole story.

CAMDEN PUBLIC LIBRARY