TThe 1998 Sandra Bullock movie Hope Floats may have put Smithville on the map, but the small Bastrop County town has another claim to fame. A 20-foot-tall metal gingerbread man with a nametag that reads: “Hello, My Name Is ‘Smitty.’”
You can find Smitty tucked away in a grassy courtyard at the intersection of Main and North First streets. Wearing a red bowtie and Santa hat, Smitty is more than just a friendly face. He is a monument to the day Smithville broke the record for the world’s largest gingerbread man. The previous record holder, a 14-foot, 11-inch cookie weighing 400 pounds, was baked on Feb. 21, 2006, by a bakery owner in Rochester, Minnesota. Smithville took less than a year to shatter that record. On Dec. 2, 2006, the town unveiled a cookie that tipped the scale at a hearty 1,308 pounds.
Smitty the gingerbread man
Smithville Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center
106 NE 1st St., Smithville.
“We blew the last record out of the water,” says Fran Hunter, who was on the board of directors of the Smithville Area Chamber of Commerce and participated in the community-wide effort.
Smitty’s origin began a few years earlier, when the chamber needed a theme for its annual Festival of Lights event, taking place Dec. 6 this year. The board decided to decorate the town with 6-foot-tall gingerbread men made of plywood and painted by local high school students. After three years, chamber members wanted to up the stakes.
Chamber president Adena Lewis contacted the Culinary Institute of America in Austin and local officials and business owners for help. The city of Smithville oversaw the building of the open-air oven, which was composed of cinder blocks and a dump-truck load of charcoal. Workers from the Lower Colorado River Authority welded a cookie sheet with a gingerbread man frame that resembled a giant cookie cutter.
Gina Chronis, then-owner of La Cabana restaurant, calculated and ordered the ingredients, which included 49 gallons of molasses, 72 dozen eggs, and 750 pounds of flour donated by Pioneer Flour in San Antonio. “It was very easy to come up with the formula,” she says. The hard part came next: actually making the dough.”
At 6 a.m., on the day of the 16th annual Festival of Lights, volunteers started mixing the ingredients at the Smithville Recreation Center. They separated eggs and mixed batches of batter over several hours.
“The rec center looked like it had a snowstorm, there was flour everywhere,” Lewis recalls. Volunteers carried buckets of batter to the open-air oven, located two blocks away at James H. Long Railroad Park. They poured the batter into the frame on the metal cookie sheet, which rested over the coals on cinder blocks.
As the dough baked, parts of it got too hot and adjustments had to be made. “At one point, the head part started smoking,” Hunter recalls, laughing. A crane truck had to lift the metal sheet, turn it around, and put it back down. Other times, the crane lifted the sheet to let the fire department spray down overly hot areas.
They also forgot to consider how long the cookie would need to cool before they could add the frosting. When it was finally time for the icing, they placed 2-by-6 boards across the frame so an instructor from the Culinary Institute could squat on the boards and use paddles to decorate.
One final test had to be passed to break the record: The cookie had to be lifted 45 degrees by the crane. “When we stood him up, we didn’t know if he was going to slide down and be a pile of mush,” Lewis says. “Luckily he was burned in well enough that he wasn’t going to go anywhere.”
Smithville couldn’t afford to pay Guinness to send a representative to the town, so they had to record the moment on videotape. An engineer signed off on the cookie’s angle, while a county judge approved the weight. Around 10:30 p.m., it was time to taste the result.
Eager to be part of town history, Smithvillians waited in line to pay $1 for a slice of cookie. They raised $1,500 for the Festival of Lights, meaning almost half the town came out to try the cookie. However, parts of it were either undercooked or overcooked and the whole thing had a smoky taste from the charcoal.
“Luckily we weren’t judged on flavor because we would have lost,” Lewis says. “The end product was horrible.”
The city partnered with the LCRA to erect a monument to mark the record-breaking event. Volunteers welded a second metal sheet over the original metal frame used to bake the cookie and painted it to match the frosting. On the one-year anniversary, Smithville held a contest to name the monument. Smitty beat out Gingersnap.
Smitty originally lived next to the gazebo in Railroad Park at Main and North First streets. “The first day he was up, I had a woman who lived on the second floor of a building on Main Street call me,” Lewis recalls. “She said she would never be able to sleep in her house again because he was staring right into her windows.”
Smitty has returned home; he now resides in an area called Smitty’s Corner, which is also dedicated to Lewis. Some townspeople were unhappy that Smitty was no longer visible at the end of Main Street. But, Hunter says, “Smitty is now where he was baked.”
Smithville only held the world’s largest gingerbread man record for three years. Workers at an IKEA store in Oslo, Norway, broke the record on Nov. 9, 2009, with their 1,435-pound cookie. That record stands today. Nevertheless, the community of Smithville still takes pride in its achievement.
“Little towns have to figure out what their thing is,” Lewis says. “In Smithville, it’s film because of Hope Floats. But people come and take pictures in front of the gingerbread man. He has his own Facebook page. He’s part of the heart of the town now.”
