Stanton was first called Fred

The county seat of Montcalm County was first called Fred. When the settlement was organized in 1860, it took the name of Fred Hall of Ionia — a plain, blunt little name for a still-forested patch of land near the dead center of the county. The name didn’t stick. In 1863 the town was renamed for Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, and Stanton it has been ever since.

The reason the courthouse ended up here, and not in Greenville, comes down to geography and a vote. Greenville had held the county seat since 1840, down in the southwest corner. But as settlers filled in the rest of the county, a corner seat meant a long wagon trip for everyone on the far side. In 1860 the voters chose to move the seat to the middle, where the trip would be fair from any direction. They picked a spot in the woods, named it Fred, and built a county around it.

Levi Camburn’s family were the first to settle the place, and Camburn became the first postmaster on March 10, 1862. The town was platted in 1865, incorporated as a village in 1869, and became a city in 1881. It never grew large — barely two square miles, with a population still under 1,500 — which makes it one of the smaller cities in Michigan to carry a courthouse.

That smallness is the tell. Stanton isn’t a big town that happened to land the courthouse; it’s a courthouse that a county built a town around, on purpose, so the clerk and the register of deeds would sit at the heart of things. Drive in today and the courthouse square is still the obvious center of everything — exactly as the 1860 voters drew it up.