A food observance on the first Friday in June celebrating donuts and honoring the women who served them to soldiers in World War I.
“The Salvation Army launched the first National Donut Day in Chicago in 1938, a Depression-era fundraiser honoring its World War I Donut Lassies.
The Salvation Army held the first National Donut Day in Chicago in 1938 as a Great Depression fundraiser and to honor its World War I Donut Lassies, the volunteers who served fresh donuts and coffee to American soldiers near the front lines in France in 1917 and 1918.
Before National Donut Day was a free-donut promotion, it was a thank-you note to women who fried dough a few miles from the trenches. The day honors the Salvation Army's "Donut Lassies," volunteers who set up huts near the front in France during World War I and handed warm donuts and coffee to exhausted American soldiers.
The scale of that effort is the part most people never hear. Once the Lassies were fully equipped, they served up to nine thousand donuts a day, cooked in cramped huts within range of shellfire.
So the cheerful June giveaway carries an unlikely backstory. The treat people line up for now is the same one that traveled home in the memory of grateful "doughboys," and the day that celebrates it began not as a marketing stunt but as a wartime tribute.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Donut Day ran on June 6. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
The fried sweet that Americans now call a donut arrived with Dutch settlers, who brought the "olykoek," or "oily cake," to New Amsterdam in the 1600s. These were simple balls of sweetened dough dropped into hot fat. The familiar ring shape, with its tidy hole, came much later and from a far murkier story.
The ring's hole is popularly credited to a Maine ship captain named Hanson Gregory, around 1847. As the story goes, Gregory disliked the greasy, undercooked centers and punched them out. In an interview at age 85, he claimed to have cut "the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes." It is a wonderful tale, and an unproven one. Several competing versions circulate, and fact-checkers conclude the inventor cannot be pinned down. The hole is folklore wearing the costume of history.
The donut's American chapter turns serious in 1917. The Salvation Army sent volunteers to France, where two of them, Ensign Margaret Sheldon and Adjutant Helen Purviance, started frying donuts when baking near the front proved impossible. The output was staggering for a makeshift hut. Purviance wrote home of two women making 2,500 doughnuts in a single day, along with cupcakes, pies, pancakes, and gallons of cocoa. Soldiers called them the Donut Lassies, and many carried the taste home with them.
The donut became a mass-market treat once a Russian refugee named Adolph Levitt built the first automatic doughnut machine in New York in 1920. Eighteen years later, the Salvation Army turned the wartime memory into a fundraiser. It held the first National Donut Day in Chicago in 1938, during the Great Depression, both to raise money for people in need and to honor the women who had served donuts under fire.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
It is one of the few popular observances that honors the women who served at the World War I front, not just the soldiers.
Most World War I memory centers on the men in the trenches. National Donut Day is one of the few popular observances that points back to the women who served alongside them, close enough to the front to be in danger themselves.
Soldiers who ate the Lassies' donuts in France came home with a craving for them. The day quietly credits that wartime moment with helping turn a fried Dutch cake into a fixture of the American morning.
The observance has never fully left its roots. The Salvation Army still runs Donut Day as a fundraiser, so the day that began by feeding soldiers now helps raise money for people in need.
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No. It is an unofficial observance, not a federal or public holiday, so there are no closures or days off. It is a food and charity day.
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