Barb Feilmeier makes a paper model before constructing her gingerbread buildings. She incorporated the very first pattern she ever made, a church, into her 2020 project, an 1880s western village.

Mitchell’s Gingerbread Architect

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Barb Feilmeier does some of her best dreaming in grocery store snack aisles, envisioning new ways to use cookies, crackers and other foods to decorate her intricate Christmas creations. The Mitchell woman has been building with gingerbread for 50 years, but these are not your ordinary cookie houses. Feilmeier has recreated everything from the Corn Palace to the South Dakota State Capitol.

Feilmeier was at home with four young children when she made her first gingerbread structure, a church, in 1970, based on instructions she found in Family Circle. It’s been part of her holiday routine ever since. Her early efforts were relatively simple, but that changed after she retired from her job as a medical technologist in 2005. “I got carried away,” she says.

A lot of prep work goes into Feilmeier’s most elaborate buildings. First, she chooses a subject, which usually has personal significance. She recreated Ireland’s Kilcolgan Castle after taking a family trip there in 2018 and commemorated her and husband Leon’s 50th anniversary in 2011 by replicating the Church of Saint Mary in Sioux Falls. Feilmeier takes reference photos and plots out the dimensions of each piece to scale. Then she makes a model out of paper to make sure each section fits together perfectly. In 2016, when she made her son-in-law Kelly Kramer’s Chevrolet dealership — complete with fondant people, a candy Lego counter, Life Savers toilet and a baby grand piano fabricated from melba toast — she made multiple passes through the building to understand the layout. “I couldn’t figure it out. I used my kids’ Lego blocks to figure out where it was all supposed to be.”

Once the pattern has been worked out to her satisfaction, the mixing, baking, decorating and assembly begins. These steps come with their own hazards. One year when her children were young, she went to assemble her house, only to discover a section of gingerbread was missing. “Some little darling came along and ate one of the sides,” Feilmeier remembers. (Decades later, the crime remains unsolved.) Then there was the year a wayward nudge sent a fully-decorated section of gingerbread shattering to the floor. “I broke the whole front of St. Peter’s Basilica,” she says.

Feilmeier keeps a detailed scrapbook containing plans and photos of each year’s creations and has given presentations on her gingerbread architecture to local groups, but when the holidays are over, she’s ready to say goodbye to the buildings themselves. “I have no problem getting a garbage bag and smashing them and throwing them out,” she says. “I’m already thinking about what I’m going to do next year.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.