Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Kappa Kappa, IL

Kappa is a small village in Woodford County, in central Illinois, and it is part of the Peoria metropolitan statistical area.

Kappa sits on the north side of the Mackinaw River, about five miles northwest of Lake Bloomington and five miles northeast of Evergreen Lake.

Thomas Dixon became the first settler in the Kappa area in 1833, and he had already built a grist mill on the Mackinaw River around 1830 that drew customers from 25 to 30 miles away.

Rail service and postal service began in the early 1850s, when the Illinois Central Railroad built through the settlement.

The village's first postmaster, William Jones, proposed the name Montrose, but the railroad preferred Kappa, and the place was briefly called Roxan from May 1852 to December 1853 before Kappa was officially adopted.

A folk etymology claims Kappa was named for the tenth letter of the Greek alphabet because it was supposedly the tenth town between Dunleith, now East Dubuque, and Bloomington, but place-name research traces it instead to a corruption of Quapaw, a Native American people of the region.

The old East Dubuque-to-Bloomington railroad line through Kappa was later decommissioned, and U.S. Route 51 now bypasses the village to the west, leaving Illinois Route 251 as the main north-south road through town.

Kappa's population bottomed out at 119 in 1960 but rebounded to 229 in the 2020 census, slightly up from 227 in 2010; the 2000 census had counted 170 people in 63 households.

Children in Kappa attend schools in the El Paso-Gridley Community Unit School District 11.