Freeport, MI

Freeport is a Barry County village mostly within Irving Township, with a small portion extending into Carlton Township. Families were traveling the old trail from Battle Creek before the village took shape, and a local school was operating by 1854. William Yule owned 400 acres in the area before the land passed through other hands to John Roush and his family. In 1874, Samuel and M. S. Roush laid out the town in anticipation of a railroad. That gamble brought new businesses, churches, clubs, and houses as the street plan filled in.

Freeport had grown to about 500 residents by 1884, with a grist mill, handle factory, two planing mills, woodworking works, an opera house, hotel, school, newspaper, and general stores. The railroad arrived in 1889 and strengthened the village's ties to the farms around it. Automobiles later reduced the importance of the train, but the older commercial pattern remains in the village streets. Freeport's history is built around a railroad that arrived after the town was planned and an agricultural hinterland that kept it working. The 2020 census counted 542 residents, giving the village a present-day scale close to the community that grew during its late nineteenth-century expansion.