Attica was Mill Station, then Elk Lake, before it settled on a name

A New York lumberman named William Williams put up a sawmill here in 1851, and for a long time the place wasn’t sure what to call itself. When the post office opened on October 9, 1867, it went by the plainest possible name: Mill Station. That’s what the cluster of buildings was — a station, by the mill. Three years later, on September 12, 1870, somebody decided Elk Lake sounded better, and the post office became Elk Lake. That didn’t stick either. On February 1, 1871, it changed a third time, taking the name of the township around it: Attica.

Three names in under four years is a lot of repainting the sign. It tells you how unsettled a young lumber settlement was — the mill drew people, the railroad and the timber trade gave them a reason to stay, but the town’s identity hadn’t hardened yet. Williams’s first postmaster was Oscar Williams, keeping it in the family. By the early 1860s there was already a little knot of half a dozen buildings around the sawmill, the start of a real place.

Attica, the name that won, is borrowed twice over — there’s an Attica in New York, and the original is in ancient Greece, the region around Athens. How it landed on a Lapeer County township is the sort of thing that usually traces back to a homesick settler or a fashion for classical names that swept rural New York and rode west with the people who left it. Michigan is full of these transplanted names: Ovid, Rome, Athens, Ionia.

The lumber ran out, the way it always did, and Attica eased into the quiet farming township it still is. But the post office’s three-name shuffle is a fossil of the noisier years, when the mill was running and nobody had decided yet what to call the spot it stood on.