Oak Grove Mission

After several years at Lake Calhoun and battles with the Ojibwe (Anishinabe), Chief Cloud Man (Marpiyawicasta) moved to the banks of the Minnesota River, and in 1843 Gideon and Samuel Pond followed him to this river bluff location. Later that year, Gideon Pond, assisted by Eli Pettijohn, built a log mission house where the two Pond families lived and which served as a church and school for Dakota, mixed blood, and white students. Nearby stood the villages of Cloud Man, Good Road, and Kahbodaka (The Drifter), while Black Dog's village was across the river near the present-day River Hills neighborhood of Burnsville. The Ponds continued their work there, including publication of The Dakota Friend, one of the first religious newspapers in the state and one of the earlier native bi-lingual (Dakota-English) newspapers in the country. Gideon Pond served members of Cloud Man's band until 1853, when the treaty of Mendota led to the relocation of the Dakotas to a strip of land farther west along the Minnesota River. At that time, Samuel and Gideon Pond resigned from the Dakota Mission and began churches for white settlers entering the Minnesota Territory, while remaining sympathetic to the Dakota though skeptical of their future under the annuity system. In 1856 the Gideon Pond family moved into a newly built brick house, the mission house was dismantled, and its timbers were used to build a barn east of the brick house.

Bloomington, Minnesota · United States