The following article by archival researcher Cynthia Van Ness is perfectly timed in advance of the National Buffalo Wing Festival, scheduled to be held on Saturday, August 29th (11am to 8pm), and Sunday, August 30th (11am to 6pm) at Sahlen Field.
Key to color-coding and abbreviations:
- Red = events specific to the Bellissimos and the Anchor Bar
- Purple = events specific to John Young and Wings & Things
- Green = everything else
- Note: the Anchor Bar‘s version is called Buffalo-style chicken wings (BSCW).
This project collects documentary evidence in chronological order, tracing the evolution of chicken wings, popularly called Buffalo wings, from a local delicacy to a national culinary favorite. The result is over 100 events, major and minor, from 1855 to the present. We expect to add to it as needed.
Basing this chronology on documents means that when we or anyone else finds evidence of an error or omission, we can promptly correct it. This is how history works. When new or previously unknown evidence emerges, historians revise and/or re-interpret.
We built a Google sheet to record our findings, then used Flippity.net to generate a timeline from our sheet. The Activity tab was created by Flippity, not us. Teachers might find it useful.
Each date is a clickable link that cites sources, a few of which are offline, but most provide an illustration or link or both, so that you can evaluate them for yourself.
Preference was given to primary sources. Our emphasis was more on bibliography, finding and correctly citing as many relevant sources as possible; less on interpretation, editorializing, or conclusions, though we did insert a few comments.
To compile this timeline, we spent a lot of time at Newspapers.com and NYSHistoricNewspapers.org. This is because The Buffalo History Museum digitized its public domain newspapers at Newspapers.com. The Buffalo & Erie County Public Library followed suit and contributed additional public domain newspapers that the museum didn’t have.
Then, Newspapers.com licensed the Buffalo News years that Lee Enterprises has the rights to, roughly 1930 to the present. Newspapers.com now has the most comprehensive access to Buffalo newspapers, pre- and post-internet. This includes the portions of the Criterion and Challenger, Buffalo’s Black newspapers. The most critical paper that they lack is the Courier-Express‘s final years, 1964-1982.
While there are almost 30,000 newspapers online at Newspapers.com, they do not have every newspaper in America. This is why several entries are written provisionally as First Recorded, First Advertised, Earliest Known, etc., instead of just plain First. As more newspapers and other period sources are digitized, these entries may need revision or replacement.
We also used NYSHistoricNewspapers.org because it does have a few years of the Courier-Express post-1964, plus some Buffalo-area college and town newspapers. Newspapers are not the only sources we consulted, though they were the most fruitful. We also dug into Google Books, Archive.org, HathiTrust.org, and more.
There were hundreds of newspaper entries for the name John Young. We scrolled past John Young-wrong middle initials, Mrs. John Young on Chapin Parkway, out-of-town John Youngs, wrong age John Youngs, John Youngs who died prior to 1998, wrong occupation John Youngs (astronaut, congressmember, boxer, ballplayer, to name a few), and John Youngs who had debts, which we decided were not critical to the project of documenting chicken wings if any of them happened to be our John Young.
Fair warning to chicken wing partisans in Buffalo: you will see evidence that, when stacked in chronological order, is not consistent with the dates in the origin stories given later by both chicken wing pioneers.
The definitive history of chicken wings in Buffalo has not been written. This project suggests that there is enough primary source material for a scholarly, book-length history that considers chicken wings in the context of immigration patterns and foodways, the Great Northern Migration, settlement patterns in Buffalo, racial discrimination, popular culture, and more. We’re looking at you, food historians. Someone please write a PhD dissertation!
Lead image: Photo by Allen Y