The Thumb town named for Cairo, Egypt — sort of

Caro took its name from one of the oldest cities on earth, then dropped a letter. The town sits near the geographic center of Tuscola County, and for its first years that center was the whole idea — people just called the place Centerville. The trouble with Centerville is that half the small towns in Michigan were also called Centerville, and the mail got confused.

So in 1869 the local leaders went looking for something that wouldn’t get mixed up with anywhere else. The name they landed on was Caro — a trimmed-down spelling of Cairo, the great city on the Nile. Why an Egyptian capital, for a settlement of sawmills and stump fields in lower Michigan? Nobody left a tidy reason. It was the fashion of the era to reach for grand far-off names, and Cairo carried a whiff of ambition for a county seat that hoped to grow. Drop the “i,” and you have a word that’s all your own.

Caro had already won the bigger prize a few years earlier. When the county organized, Vassar held the seat, but the supervisors voted to move it to the more central spot — and a town near the middle of a farming county, with the courthouse and the county business, tends to stick. The sugar-beet factory came in 1899 and gave Caro a second identity it still wears.

The name, though, is the quiet oddity. Say “Caro” to most Michiganders and they think of beet sugar and the county courthouse, not the pyramids. But the next time you drive M-81 into town and pass the welcome sign, you can tell whoever’s in the passenger seat that the place is named, however loosely, for a city four thousand miles away that was old when Rome was young. It rhymes with “arrow,” by the way — locals will correct you fast if you try to make it sound Egyptian.