How a Michigan farm town ended up named Yale

There is no Ivy League campus on Mill Creek, and there never was. Yale, Michigan — the little farm town northwest of Port Huron — borrowed its grand name on purpose, and the borrowing is half the fun.

The settlement began in the early 1850s on the banks of Mill Creek and went by Brockway Centre, after Lewis Brockway, one of the first settlers to put down roots in the area. “Brockway Centre” was perfectly serviceable, but by the 1880s the townspeople had decided it sounded too much like a wide spot in the road. They wanted something with a little more polish. At the suggestion of a resident named B.R. Noble, they reached clear across the country and lifted the name of Yale — the Connecticut college — purely because it rang of learning and standing. The post office made it official on June 24, 1889, and the village incorporated as Yale not long after; the city charter followed in 1905.

It’s a very American move: a couple thousand farmers in the Thumb deciding that the cure for a plain name was to annex the reputation of an Ivy League school nobody in town had attended. Nothing else connects the two Yales — no founder, no benefactor, no shared history. The name was pure aspiration, picked off a list of things that sounded distinguished.

The funny part is what the town is actually famous for now. Yale didn’t become a seat of learning; it became the self-styled Bologna Capital, with a July festival built around fried bologna sandwiches and outhouse races. So the place wears two names worth of swagger at once — an Ivy League title up on the welcome sign, and a smoked lunch meat doing the real bragging.