Fremont's namesake never came here — he was off mapping the West

Everybody knows Fremont as the baby food town, but the name on the welcome sign belongs to a man who almost certainly never set foot here. The first settlers in the 1850s called the spot Weaverville, after pioneer Daniel Weaver. A few years later the postmaster renamed it Fremont Centre for John C. Frémont — and Frémont, at the time, was one of the most famous men in America for reasons that had nothing to do with West Michigan.

They called him the Pathfinder. Through the 1840s Frémont led expeditions across the Rockies and the Great Plains, mapping much of the Oregon Trail and sending back vivid government reports that thousands of westward emigrants read like guidebooks. His name got stamped on the national imagination, and grateful or admiring towns scattered “Fremont” across the map from California to Nebraska to New Hampshire — and here in Newaygo County.

He was more than an explorer. In 1856 Frémont became the very first presidential candidate of the brand-new Republican Party, running on a platform against the spread of slavery. He lost, but he put the party on the map, and during the Civil War he served as a Union general. Naming a frontier Michigan timber town after him, in those years, was a small political statement as much as a tribute.

The pioneers dropped the “Centre” along the way, the village incorporated in 1875, and it became a city in 1911 — the same era a local cannery was about to start mashing peas and carrots for babies and make the town famous all over again. Two names, really, layered on one place: an explorer who mapped the West, and the strained-fruit empire that came later.