Gideon and Agnes Hopkins Pond, missionaries to the Dakota Indians, farmers, and ministers to the community of Bloomington, Minnesota, lived in a nineteenth-century dwelling whose development reflected the family's long presence on the site. After moving from the Lake Calhoun area in 1843, Gideon Pond and Eli Pettijohn built a two-story log mission house near this site. In 1852, Pond built a wood-frame preemption house to lay claim to ownership of the land. In 1856, Pond and hired help constructed a Federal Style brick house attached to the wooden preemption house, using about 60,000 bricks made from clay dug from the river bottoms. Soon afterward, the log mission house was dismantled and its timbers were used to build a split-level barn. In 1910, the preemption house was dismantled and replaced with a two-story addition. For more than 140 years, four generations of Pond descendants lived here. The City of Bloomington purchased the property in 1975, carried out stabilization work in the 1980s, and in 1995 completed a full restoration of the brick house, replacing the two-story addition with a replica of the original preemption house. Since that restoration was completed in 1995, the house has been maintained as a museum by the City of Bloomington, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.