The 1951 Gerber-family fund that still pays for Newaygo County's trails and scholarships

A surprising amount of what makes Newaygo County livable — a stretch of trail, a kid’s first semester of college, a small nonprofit that didn’t fold — traces back to a fund a handful of Fremont people set up in 1951. Among the founders were members of the Gerber family, whose baby food company is headquartered right there in town. They called it the Fremont Foundation, and the idea was simple: gather charitable gifts in one place and put them to work.

A community foundation keeps working for seventy-odd years on a simple trick. It’s a permanent pool of donated money. People leave gifts or set up named funds, the foundation invests the principal, and only the earnings get paid out — year after year, the original gift untouched. Money that came in during the Eisenhower administration is still cutting checks. That 1951 fund grew into the Fremont Area Community Foundation, which now manages hundreds of separate funds and serves the whole county.

It’s the quiet reason a rural county of around 50,000 people has resources that punch above its size. Scholarships go out to local students. Grants go to schools, parks, and nonprofits. People set up their own charitable funds through it, or give through their estates, and the money keeps circling back into the same handful of towns.

So a new trailhead sign, or a scholarship plaque on the wall of a Newaygo County school, will often trace back to a meeting in Fremont in 1951, where a few people decided to start saving the place’s spare generosity instead of spending it.