About

Welcome to Ochre Springs Homestead! Yes, we are an actual place…actually it is our family home. We are located just south of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area in New Market Township, Minnesota. On 10 acres we have our home, some pasture land, beautiful gardens and landscaping, woods, wetland, and 33,000 square feet of lawn!

Life isn’t just a matter of the spaces we live in, but how we use those spaces to enrich the lives of our family and friends, as well as the community that surrounds us. As a homeschooling family (and we have been since 2013), our home is the classroom for our kids. As thinkers and creators, we have formed spaces to work, read, write, and form. As stewards, we strive to make our place beautiful, inviting, and enjoyable.

About Our Name

Among the rolling, wooded hills and sweeping expanses of cropland lying between them are farms and estates that lay claim to lands that once were free to all peoples — particularly the indigenous Dakota that hunted and made this region their home.

Several small spring and pond-fed creeks come together in our area to form the Vermillion River, a small tributary of the Mississippi River. The Vermillion River was so-named by French-born geographer Joseph Nicollet when he explored our area to properly map the Mississippi river basin in the 1830. He was shown Chimney Rock, a natural monolith of sandstone that was carved out by glaciers with seams of ochre (sometimes referred to as vermillion) that local natives used for skin paint. The main river flows north of Chimney Rock, but several feeder creeks run very close by.

The southern boundary of Ochre Springs Homestead includes one of those creeks that eventually feeds the Vermillion and drains into the mighty Mississippi. We can only imagine how our land was prized before us, and how blessed we are to be stewards of this tiny slice of God’s great creation.