The story
Welcome to Fremont Township
Fremont Township, on the Michigan line in northern Steuben County, was first called Brockville. Its first settlers came in August 1835, and its village, platted in 1837, took the name Fremont in 1851.
Fremont Township is township 38 north, range 14 east, about twenty-three square miles with Michigan on its north. It was first called Brockville, the 1920 county history says, and was later renamed in honor of the “pathfinder” John C. Fremont, the Republican candidate for president in 1856. Cedar Marsh, Walter’s Lake and Fish Lake lie within it. The township was voting by 1840, when it gave William H. Harrison 59 votes to Martin Van Buren’s 45.
The first land was entered on June 23, 1834, three eighty-acre tracts where the south part of Fremont village now stands, by George Dwight Parmenter, Seba Ann Parmenter and John McCune. Late in August 1835 John McMahan stopped a mile from the present village and became the first settler; Demary Tillitson, who passed him two hours later, was the second. That fall came Jeremiah Tillitson, Jacob Rood, Fred Bowers and Peter Cluck. The nearest market was Toledo, where Tillitson hauled wheat by ox team and sold it for fifty cents a bushel.
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The first frame building was put up in 1837 by a man named Goodwin, and a Mr. Parker of Fort Wayne opened the first store in a log house. The village of Brockville was platted in 1837 on what had been called Willow Prairie; in 1851 the post office became Fremont, because there was already a Brockville in southern Indiana. A mail route from Blissfield, Michigan, to Lima began in 1838. At the Fourth of July celebration of 1838 Goodwin, painted as a warrior, staged a mock Indian alarm that the settlers did not forgive. The frame of the Methodist Episcopal church was raised in 1844, and the first frame schoolhouse was built in 1845.
The railroad came in 1870, when the Fort Wayne, Jackson & Saginaw was built through the county, crossing Fremont Township and leaving the county from its section 13, with stations at Fremont and at Ray in the northeast corner; it later became part of the Lake Shore and the New York Central. The 2020 census counted 2,851 people in Fremont Township.