Capac: An Inca Emperor Names a Michigan Village

Most small Michigan villages are named for early settlers or nearby rivers. Capac, in St. Clair County, chose a different path entirely.

When Judge DeWitt Walker and a group from Romeo platted the settlement in eighteen fifty-seven, the judge named it for Huayna Capac, ruler of the Inca Empire at its greatest extent in the early fifteen hundreds. No one recorded why Walker reached six thousand miles south to the Andes for a village name in Michigan's Thumb, but the choice was deliberate. A post office operating nearby as Pinery transferred to the new village and took the Capac name in January of eighteen fifty-eight.

The Grand Trunk Railroad opened a station in eighteen sixty-six, and the village was incorporated in eighteen seventy-three. An Inca emperor has lent his name to a small farming community for over a hundred and sixty years.