Fremont, Nebraska

This town carries the name of a man who never lived here but who shaped the West more than almost anyone. John Charles Fremont was an army topographical engineer who led two great expeditions across the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Basin in the early eighteen forties. In the late summer of eighteen forty-two he and his men passed right through this stretch of the Platte Valley on their way back east, mapping country that thousands of emigrants would soon follow.

When settlers laid out a new town site here in eighteen fifty-six, they named it for Fremont, who that very year was the brand new Republican Party's first candidate for president. He lost the election to James Buchanan, but his name stuck to this place on the river. By eighteen sixty, Fremont had become the seat of Dodge County, a railroad and trading hub on the road west.