How Mikado got an opera's name by accident

A small town in the Alcona woods carries the name of a comic opera set in Japan, and the man who founded the place had nothing to do with the choice. Daniel D. Bruce, born in Ontario and homesteading here by the 1880s, laid out his settlement on a railroad stop and did what founders do: he tried to name it after himself. He asked the Post Office for “Bruce Crossing.”

The Post Office said no — there was already a Bruce Crossing up in the Upper Peninsula, and two of them would jam the mail. So the decision fell to an assistant postmaster general in Washington, and his mind happened to be on a night at the theater. He’d recently enjoyed “The Mikado,” the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that swept America after it opened in 1885, and he stamped that name on a logging town in northern Michigan. Bruce’s settlement became Mikado, and it has answered to a Victorian stage hit ever since.

Bruce got his town anyway, just not his name on it. He built the Bruce Hotel and a livery barn in the mid-1880s as the Detroit, Bay City and Alpena Railroad pushed north through the area, and the plat around the depot filled in with houses and mills. The railroad is long gone and the lumber boom with it, but the township still answers to Mikado, and the township hall and a scatter of homes mark where Bruceville almost was.

It’s a fine bit of irony for a quiet farming and forest community: a name plucked from an operetta about a faraway emperor, pinned on a place where the loudest thing for miles is usually the wind in the pines.