Freeland's Walleye Festival: forty years of fish, parades, and small-town spring

If you move to Freeland, your new neighbors will explain the calendar like this: there’s winter, and then there’s Walleye Fest. Every spring since the mid-1980s — the festival marked its 40th year in April 2026 — Tittabawassee Township’s hometown throws a four-day party timed to the walleye run up the river: a fishing tournament, a Friday-night parade, carnival rides, live music, races, and thousands of people packing a town of a few thousand. Proceeds flow back into the community through the local Lions Club.

It’s the kind of event that tells you what a place values. Freeland has grown into one of the Saginaw area’s most sought-after school districts and bedroom communities — it’s also home to MBS International, the region’s airport — but one weekend a year it’s purely a river town again, celebrating the fish that’s fed the valley since before anyone named it.