Every St. Louis schoolchild learns the story: Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian waffle vendor at the 1904 World’s Fair, noticed that the ice cream vendor next to him had run out of dishes. Hamwi rolled one of his zalabia waffles into a cone shape and handed it to his neighbor as a substitute. The ice cream cone was born. St. Louis did it again.

The problem is that at least six other people made essentially the same claim, and several of them appear to have done so before Hamwi.

Abe Doumar, working the fair’s midway, claimed to have invented the cone and went on to open a chain of ice cream stands using cone-making machines he designed himself. Charles Menches, also present at the fair, claimed a variation involving a bouquet of flowers and an act of romantic improvisation. David Avayou claimed he’d seen similar paper cones in France and simply translated the idea into edible form.

Then there are the pre-fair claimants. An 1888 cookbook contains a recipe for “cornets” filled with ice cream. An 1894 Italian food patent describes something remarkably similar. A New York confectioner named Italo Marchiony filed a patent for an ice cream cone mold in December 1903 — months before the fair opened.

The fair itself — the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in Forest Park from April to December 1904 — was the largest world’s fair in history to that point, with 1,576 acres of exhibition space and fifty million visitors. It was a genuine crucible of culinary innovation: the hot dog bun, Dr Pepper’s wider distribution, peanut butter’s popularization, and iced tea’s mainstreaming all have legitimate claims to the fair’s influence.

The ice cream cone dispute was eventually “settled” by Hamwi’s account becoming the dominant narrative, partly because Hamwi was the most energetic self-promoter and partly because the story is clean and appealing. He later founded the Cornucopia Waffle Cone Company in St. Louis, which gave him a financial incentive to maintain the story.

The honest answer, which no one in the civic promotional apparatus prefers, is that the cone was a convergent invention that several people developed independently at roughly the same time, driven by the same market conditions. The World’s Fair was the occasion for its popularization, not its invention.

But Forest Park is still there, still beautiful, and the fair’s footprint — Art Hill, the Palace of Fine Arts (now the St. Louis Art Museum), the lily ponds — is still legible in the landscape. Whatever you believe about the cone, you can eat one in the park where all the fuss happened. That counts for something.