History:

Fremont was first settled as “Willow Prairie” in 1834. The first entry for land was recorded for three parcels of 80 acres each on the south side of the site where this new village in northeast Indiana would be located. A plat was filed and the village name changed to Brockville in 1837. The name was changed to Fremont in 1850 in honor of General John Charles Fremont (shown), a distinguished military officer and explorer, known as “the Pathfinder”. Fremont was chosen by Jeremiah Tillotson, an early settler and ardent admirer of the General. Fremont was incorporated as a town in 1867.

Fremont was founded on the Vistula Trail (now Indiana State Road 120) which was originally an Indian trail that ran from Fort Duquesne (Pittsburg, PA) through South Bend and around the south shore of Lake Michigan to Green Bay. It was used extensively in the 1600s and 1700s by French missionaries and fur traders. The road gained its name from “Vistula on the Maumee” (now Toledo, Ohio), an important trading post at the mouth of the Maumee River on Lake Erie. For a short time in the early 1700s Spain claimed this area. In 1763 this oldest trail across the Northwest Territory frontier, fell under the authority of Great Britain. It remained under British control and was known as Territorial Road until the region was won by the Americans during the American Revolution and secured in the War of 1812. The road was established as a state road in 1833 by act of the Indiana Legislature, with final approval in 1835. The original road veered north at the west edge of the new village to pass around the northern end of the great Kankakee swamp which was impassible in the early days. It is a matter of local family history that Joseph Smith and his band of Mormon followers used the Vistula Trail on their migration west in the 1830s.

Northeast Indiana has a rich Native American history. The Miami Indians and their family tribes the Potawatomies, Shawnees, Delawares and others, all part of the Algonquin’s, had lived throughout the region surrounding the headwaters of the Maumee River, since at least the time of the early white settlements on the Atlantic coast. These great tribes were among the western Algonquin tribes who held the great basin east of the Mississippi River and the Miamis were everywhere between Detroit and the Ohio River in the region. The first white men would not visit the area until the migration of early French fishermen and trappers in the mid-1600s, still more than 100 years before the American Revolutionary War. They remained until most were forced west following the Indian wars and treaties of the mid-1800s. Among noted chiefs from the area were Miami Chief Little Turtle (shown) and Potawatomi Chiefs Leopold Pokagon and his son Simon, after whom Pokagon State Park was named.