Before this land became Northern Lights Homesteads, it had another name.

The Frankie.

Not a name from a deed or a county map. A family name. The kind of name that

showed up in everyday sentences like, “We’re going to work the Frankie this afternoon.”

But its real story is not in the legal description. It is in the people who worked it, lost it, saved it, and kept calling it by name.

The Phillips family story in Teton Valley reaches back to around 1899, during the

homestead era, when Levi Alfred Phillips and his wife, Lydia McFerson Phillips, came

with their family and made a life out of raw ground. Family history says that when they

arrived, there was one other family living down on the Teton River, the Breckenridge’s,

but not a fence, ditch, or road in Tetonia. Their first home was a one-room cabin with a

sod roof, crowded with six people and probably more patience than comfort.

Their son, Jedidiah “Jed” Phillips, carried the family’s work forward. Somewhere along

the way, Jed came to hold title to the 80 acres we now call the Frankie.

During the Depression, Jed did not have enough money to pay the taxes. Like a lot of

farm families, he had land, work, and grit, just not cash on demand. The county took the

80 acres, and it could have been gone for good.

Then Jed’s friend Frank Stewart stepped in.

At the tax sale, Frank bought the land so Jed could keep farming it until he could buy it

back. After that, the family called the place the Frankie.

Now, generations later, the Frankie is becoming Northern Lights Homesteads.

The name is intentional. A homestead is more than a house on land. It is a place people

work for, care for, and belong to. That was true for the first families who came to Teton

Valley with little more than grit, tools, and nerve. It is still true for the families who will

build here now.

Northern Lights Homesteads carries that idea forward.

This land was shaped by the homestead era, watered by hand-dug ambition, nearly lost

in the Depression, saved by friendship, and carried forward by family.

Now it becomes home again.

Not one homestead this time. But a select few.