On a Saturday afternoon in October, the smell of woodsmoke and old brick hangs over a bend in the Minnesota River valley where Bloomington's 104th Street dead-ends into a wooded park. The door of a two-story Federal-style house swings open, and for three hours the 1856 Gideon and Agnes Pond House becomes a working classroom again, as it does most Saturdays of the year. On October 17, 2026, from 1 to 4 p.m., the free drop-in program is beadwork, with all materials provided and no registration required.
It is a modest offering -- a craft table, a historic parlor, a few hours on a fall afternoon -- but it sits on one of the more layered pieces of ground in the Twin Cities metro. The house is the centerpiece of Pond-Dakota Mission Park, a 50-acre site that also holds the Oak Grove Mission site, a cemetery, and the remains of the Pond family farm and orchards. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the City of Bloomington has run it as a museum since a full restoration in 1995.
The story that put the house there begins in Connecticut. Gideon Hollister Pond, born in 1810, and his brother Samuel grew up in Washington, Connecticut, where Gideon received religious instruction, in the words of one account, "at his mother's knee" -- though he did not take religion seriously until a revival swept through the brothers in August 1831. Looking for a mission field, they settled on the Dakota people of what is now southern Minnesota. They arrived at St. Peters, now St. Paul, on May 1, 1834, with no formal training, no credentials, and no financial backing beyond their own savings.
That same year, the brothers received permission from Major Lawrence Taliaferro, the Indian agent at Fort Snelling, to establish a mission school near Bde Maka Ska, then called Lake Calhoun, where a band of Dakota spent their summers. The band's leader, Marpiya Wicasta -- Cloud Man -- had asked for help with farming, and Gideon took on that role, intending to learn the Dakota language. In 1843 the brothers followed Cloud Man to a bluff above the Minnesota River and founded the Oak Grove Mission, the site preserved today inside the park.
The buildings came in stages. After the move from Bde Maka Ska, Gideon Pond and Eli Pettijohn built a two-story log mission house near the present site. Nine years later, in 1852, Pond built a wood-frame "preemption" house to lay claim to ownership of the land. In 1856, with hired help, he constructed the brick house visitors see today, attached to the wooden preemption house and built from roughly 60,000 bricks made of clay dug out of the river bottoms. The log mission house was then dismantled, its timbers reused for a split-level barn. In 1910 the preemption house came down and a two-story addition went up in its place. For more than 140 years, the house was home to four generations of Pond descendants. Bloomington bought the property in 1975, stabilized it in the 1980s, and in 1995 restored the brick house, replacing the two-story addition with a replica of the original preemption house.
The Ponds were missionaries to the Dakota, and also farmers and ministers in the young community of Bloomington. The park's interpretation today is explicit about holding those threads together: its story boards cover the area's changing landscape, the Pond House, the Oak Grove Mission, Dakota life, and the Minnesota River Valley. The house itself is presented as a place to learn about the life and times of Gideon and Samuel Pond, the Dakota people, and the missionaries who worked with them in the mid-nineteenth century.
The beadwork program fits that mission in a direct way. Beadwork is one of the defining art forms of Dakota and other Plains nations, and the park's Saturday series regularly hands visitors something to do with their hands -- not just something to look at behind glass. The city's own event page describes the leader as a traditional Dakota artist known for exceptional beadwork and quillwork, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate who grew up immersed in her cultural traditions. (Some third-party event calendars list a different artist for the same date; the city's page is the authoritative listing.)
The broader Saturday series runs through the fall. The following week, October 24, brings a wild ricing program, and October 31 turns to "Death and Mourning in Victorian America" -- a topic that suits a house whose residents lived from the mid-1800s into the early 1900s. The house is open Saturdays from 1 to 4 p.m., and admission is free. The park also hosts an annual Dakota Language Camp and a Winter History Festival as part of Bloomington's Winter Fete.
For families, the appeal is the combination of a short, hands-on stop and room to run. The park has extensive trails, and the site sits between Nicollet and Portland Avenues, a short drive from the interstate but tucked into the river bluff. Visitors can drop in at any point during the three-hour window and then walk the grounds past the Oak Grove Mission site and the small cemetery where some of the people in this story are buried.
There is a particular resonance in holding a beadwork workshop on this land. The Pond brothers came to Minnesota to change Dakota lives, and the mission they built is now a public park where Dakota artists teach Dakota craft to whoever walks in the door. The house that Gideon Pond built from river-bottom clay to secure a land claim is now a free museum, open on Saturdays, with a table set up in one of its rooms and a pile of materials waiting. The program is drop-in, free, and open to all, and the city advises checking with the venue for last-minute changes.