Father Hennepin State Park
— the long shoreline a French priest noted in 1680.
Not only on a wall.
Father Hennepin State Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Father Hennepin State Park runs along three-quarters of a mile of Mille Lacs Lake shoreline, southeast of the lake's broad open water. Oak and basswood lean toward a stone-and-sand beach. The park is named for Louis Hennepin, the Franciscan priest who first recorded the lake on a European map in 1680. Walleye boats work the shallows. In winter the lake locks up and the ice-house villages bloom across it. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Father Hennepin State Park covers about 320 acres on the southeast shore of Mille Lacs Lake in Mille Lacs County, Minnesota, just north of the town of Isle. The park preserves roughly three-quarters of a mile of natural shoreline along the second-largest lake wholly within the state, with oak-basswood forest running back from the water. It is named for the Franciscan friar Louis Hennepin, who in 1680 was the first European to record the lake on a published map.
Mille Lacs runs the full Minnesota calendar. Summer brings walleye and smallmouth bass anglers to the south shore launches; the park has a designated swimming beach and 103 drive-in campsites. October colors the oaks across the trail loop. By mid-December the lake locks under safe ice and one of the most concentrated ice-fishing economies in the country sets up offshore, with hundreds of wheeled houses lined out toward the deeper basins.
A Minnesota state park vehicle permit is required at the entrance and runs $7 daily or $35 annually. The park is open year-round. Facilities include a campground, picnic shelters, a sand beach, and a short loop of hiking trails through the forest behind the shoreline. The nearest town is Isle, about a mile southwest; Minneapolis-St. Paul sits roughly two hours south. Walleye regulations on Mille Lacs are set by the DNR each season and change year to year.
