Stand where the cheeseburger was trademarked
Trademarked 5 March 1935
At the corner of Speer Boulevard and Alcott Street, in a lily garden in front of a bank, is a small monument put up in 1987 by a local dairy association. It marks the site of the Humpty Dumpty Barrel Inn, Colorado's first drive-in restaurant.
Why it's unique
Louis Ballast ran the Humpty Dumpty here in the 1920s and 1930s, and on 5 March 1935 he registered a trademark on the word "cheeseburger". The monument marks that, and the trademark registration is a matter of record.
The invention claim is a different matter and is genuinely disputed: Kaelin's in Louisville, Kentucky holds a 1934 menu that would beat Ballast by a year. So the honest reason to stand here is not that the cheeseburger was born on this spot, it is that this is the only place in the world that put up a monument to owning the word. It is a small, strange piece of civic pride about a trademark filing, in a flowerbed, outside a bank.
Before you go
It is a five-minute stop, not an afternoon, and it is genuinely small — people drive past it repeatedly without seeing it. Park on Alcott rather than trying to stop on Speer.
Read the plaque text rather than photographing it and moving on. The wording is careful about the trademark and vaguer about the invention, which is the whole story in one paragraph.