07/15/2026
š© š© This post is a little late but we canāt let ourselves forget to recap the better than ever Rockport Donut Festival held last month at Rockport Marine Park. We had a great time talking history with locals and visitors and especially carrying on the local Camden and Rockport tradition of defending the title of being the birthplace of the modern donut.
Thereās a fascinating mix of ancient history, maritime problem-solving, a 13-volume archive, and a high-stakes legal debate in New York City that brought us here. Hereās a little of what we know from the research weāve collected at the Camden Rockport Historical Society as well as additional info compiled at the Camden Public Library where the binders reside.
šļø A Quick History of Fried Dough
To appreciate our local connection, we have to look at what we know for sure about the donut's timeline:
* Ancient Origins: Humans have loved frying dough for millennia. The Mesopotamians made sweet cakes, and the Romans fried dough pieces to eat with honey.
* The Dutch "Olykoeks": By the 17th and 18th centuries, Dutch immigrants brought olykoeks (literally "oily cakes") to America. These were round balls of sweetened dough fried in lard. Because the thick center took so long to cook, bakers would often stuff the middle with walnuts or hazelnuts to mask the raw centerāwhich is where we get the literal term "dough-nut."
Enter Hanson Crockett Gregory, a teenager from Clam Cove (then Camden but present-day Rockport). In June 1847, while working aboard the schooner Ivanhoe, Hanson grew tired of eating grease-soaked, raw-centered "sinkers."
Seventy years later, on March 26, 1916, an 85-year-old Captain Gregory gave an interview to the Washington Post to state exactly what happened in his own words:
"Now in them days we used to cut the doughnuts into diamond shapes, and also into long strips, bent in half, and then twisted. I don't think we called them doughnuts thenāthey was just 'fried cakes' and 'twisters.' Well, sir, they used to fry all right around the edges, 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 says to myself, 'Why wouldn't a space inside solve the difficulty?' I thought at first I'd take one of the strips and roll it around, then I got an inspiration, a great inspiration. I took the cover off the ship's tin pepper box, andāI cut into the middle of that doughnut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes!
"Well, sir, them doughnuts was the finest I ever tasted. No more indigestionāno more greasy sinkersābut just well-done, fried-through doughnuts."
When Hanson returned to Maine, he shared the trick with his mother, Elizabeth, who began baking and selling the ring-shaped treats to nearby towns.
So, how did a story on a 19th-century ship become an official part of American history? That is thanks to a passionate Rockport local named Fred Crockett. Fred, a direct descendant of Captain Gregory, dedicated a massive part of his life to cementing the Captain's legacy, compiling an incredible 13 volumes of donut history.
In 1941, the American Donut Corporation sponsored "The Great Donut Debate" at the Hotel Astor in New York City. A rival claim asserted that the donut hole was actually invented on Cape Cod when a Native American shot an arrow through a pilgrim's frying cake!
Armed with his family records, Fred Crockett colorfully and victoriously debated the Cape Cod attorneys. The panel of judges and national bakers officially agreed: Hanson Gregory of Maine was the true, undisputed inventor of the donut hole!
Following Fred Crockett's big win, the local pride grew so massive that it birthed a full-fledged celebration. The first official Donut Festival was held in Camden in the late 1950s. It generated such an explosion of nationwide media coverage that town leaders actually worried about the crowds getting too large to handle!
During the peak of festival hype, a group proposed building a 300-foot bronze statue of Captain Gregory holding a donut aloft on top of Mt. Battie! A sculptor even created a clay model of it. While the towering statue was never ultimately constructed (thankfully) the spirit of that bold community planning remains legendary.
Today, the Rockport Donut Festival keeps that same midcoast pride rollingāhonoring a piece of global culinary history that started with a tin pepper box right here in our harbor.
What did we miss from the story? Add your comments!
