If haunted houses and fake cobwebs aren't your thing, there's another way to spend Halloween afternoon. Historian Miles Jewell will be at Bloomington's historic Pond House on Saturday, Oct. 31, from 1 to 4 p.m., talking about the "sentimental and sometimes macabre practices surrounding dying in the 1800s."
The city's Parks and Recreation Department is calling the program "Death and Mourning in Victorian America." The city says Jewell will cover "frightful funerary practices," including the unusual coffins of Rev. Pond himself. You'll do more than listen. You can fill out a death and mourning questionnaire, taste funeral biscuits and write a letter the old way, with a dip pen and a black wax seal. The city provides all the materials.
The program is free and drop-in, so you don't need to register. Per the city, you can ask for a tour of the house during the event. Questions go to Parks and Recreation at 952-563-8877 or [email protected].
The house fits the topic. Gideon Pond and Agnes Hopkins Pond lived there from the mid-1800s into the early 1900s. They worked as missionaries to the Dakota and as farmers and ministers in a young Bloomington. The event page includes a photo from 1878 of Agnes Pond and her sons in mourning clothes outside the house. That's a good preview of what the afternoon is about.
The brick Federal-style house went up in 1856, built from about 60,000 clay bricks. A 2-story addition followed in 1910. The city bought the property in 1975 and finished restoring it in 1995. It's on the National Register of Historic Places and sits in Pond-Dakota Mission Park at 401 E. 104th St. The grounds also have an Indigenous Plant Arboretum, where volunteers were building soil earlier this year. On a regular Saturday the house is open 1 to 4 p.m. with free admission, so this Halloween program falls during normal hours.
That gives you 3 hours to stop in, have a funeral biscuit and head home before the trick-or-treaters show up.
