National Sundae Day

History

The origin of this observance is not well documented. No founding organization, proclamation or first observance for National Sundae Day appears in any acceptable source; the date circulates only among holiday aggregators copying one another, which is not evidence. The dish is a different matter, and it is contested ground.

Two Rivers, Wisconsin holds the older claim. The Wisconsin Historical Society keeps a photograph of E. C. Berner's ice cream parlor, captioned as the place "where the first ice cream sundae is said to have been made in 1881." The hedge is the Society's own. As Wisconsin Life tells the fuller story, a local man named George Hallauer walked into Berner's soda fountain on Fifteenth Street in 1881 and asked for chocolate syrup — until then used only in sodas — poured over a dish of ice cream. Berner sold it for a nickel, and only on Sundays, until a ten-year-old asked for one midweek and proposed they pretend it was Sunday. The spelling is credited to a glassware salesman who ordered Berner's canoe-shaped dishes as "sundae dishes," a story Wisconsin Life attributes to the state rather than vouching for itself. An official Wisconsin historical marker for the sundae stands in Central Park, Two Rivers.

Two details usually attached to that account do not survive checking. No acceptable source gives an exact day; the widely repeated July 8, 1881 appears in none of them. And the name is unstable inside the Historical Society's own records, which use both Berner and Berners.

Ithaca's case is documentary rather than anecdotal. The History Center in Tompkins County dates the first sundae to April 3, 1892, when Chester C. Platt of the Platt & Colt Pharmacy served the Reverend John M. Scott vanilla ice cream with cherry syrup and a candied cherry, named a Cherry Sunday. The evidence is an advertisement in the Ithaca Daily Journal, and this is where Ithaca's own record wobbles: one History Center page dates that advertisement to April 5, 1892 in its text while the caption on its own image of it reads October 5, 1892. Covering the fight in 2007, NPR reported Ithaca researchers citing a 1936 affidavit from DeForest Christiance, a clerk at the pharmacy, and a 1939 Chicago Tribune obituary naming Ed Berners as the inventor. In the same segment an Ithaca historian put the invention in 1897, and nobody reconciled the two years.

How to observe

Pick a side on the evidence rather than the marketing. Ithaca rests on a newspaper advertisement whose date its own museum gives in two different months; Two Rivers rests on recollections written down decades later, including an obituary published fifty-eight years after the fact.

Both towns keep the argument on display. The Two Rivers Historical Society runs the Washington House Museum, with a re-creation of Berner's parlor, and the History Center in Tompkins County holds Ithaca's documents.

Otherwise order one of the two versions the sources actually describe — vanilla with chocolate syrup and nothing else for Two Rivers, or vanilla with cherry syrup and a single candied cherry for Ithaca — and notice how little either resembles what a sundae has become.