Barrett, a hamlet of Marshall county, is located on the Missouri Pacific R. R. and on the Vermillion river in Vermillion township, 20 miles southeast of Marysville, the county seat, and 3 miles from Frankfort. It has a money order postoffice, and a population in 1910 of 75.

Barrett is one of the oldest settled points in Marshall county. The first white resident outside of the French traders was G. H. Hollenberg, afterward the founder of Hollenberg, Washington county, who located in this vicinity in 1854 and opened a store for the accommodation of the emigrants to California. In 1855 a colony of 60 people from Cadiz, Ohio, selected a tract in the Vermillion valley for a settlement. Among those who came was A. G. Barrett, who in 1868 laid off the town of Barrett and gave the railroad company 40 acres of land in consideration of their building a depot and side track. The postoffice had been established since 1857.