The story
Welcome to Fremont
Fremont began as the Willow Prairie settlement of 1834–35 and was platted as Brockville in 1837. The post office was renamed for the explorer John C. Frémont, and by 1885 it was the largest place in Steuben County after Angola.
The first entries of land in the township were made on June 23, 1834, by G. D. Palmenter, S. A. Palmenter and John McCume, on the ground where the south part of the village stands. One day late in August 1835 John McMahan unhitched his horses about a mile from the present village and became the first settler in the township; Demary Tillitson passed him about two hours later and took up eighty acres. For the first weeks Tillitson’s only shelter was a few boards set against a tree. Toledo was then the nearest market, and Tillitson hauled wheat there with an ox team, selling it for fifty cents a bushel.
The settlement was known as Willow Prairie until the village of Brockville was platted in 1837. A. B. Goodwin, appointed in 1838, was the first postmaster, and the next year a horseback mail route ran from Blissfield, Michigan, to Lima, Indiana. A man named Parker from Fort Wayne kept the first store in a log building, and R. A. Gaines came from Lima early in 1839 and built a larger store and the hotel later called the American House. The state marker at the town pump notes that the place lay on the Vistula Trail, used by settlers moving west from the Detroit, Toledo and Pittsburgh areas, and that the Potawatomi were removed from the area in 1838.
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Because there was a Brookville in southern Indiana and letters went astray, the post office was renamed. Jeremiah Tillitson, an admirer of the explorer John C. Frémont, named it for him, and the township, first known as Brockville, took the same name. The frame of the first church, a Methodist one, was raised in 1844 but not finished until 1851; the first frame schoolhouse followed in 1845, and a brick school was built in 1877 after its predecessor burned.
The Fort Wayne & Jackson line, later part of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, crosses the township with stations at Fremont and Ray. In 1885 Fremont was the largest place in the county outside Angola and its only other incorporated town, with 392 people in 1870 and 632 in 1880. Dr. R. L. Wade opened a hospital in a building put up for it in 1914, which the 1920 history called the only hospital in the county, and in 1919 the Sorosis Club gave its library of more than 700 volumes to the new Fremont Public Library. The 2020 census counted 2,034 people in Fremont.