Au Gres: a French name for sandstone, and a walleye port on Saginaw Bay

The name looks like it should be hard to say, but it’s just French for the ground underfoot. When voyageurs paddled this stretch of Lake Huron, they called the low point of land here “aux grès” — at the sandstone, or the gritty stone — and the name stuck to the point, the river, and eventually the town. Say it “oh-GRAY” and you’ll sound like you’ve lived here a while.

The river the French named still runs right through the middle of things, and its mouth is the reason Au Gres exists as more than a wide spot in the road. Drop a line off the public launch at the end of Main Street and you’re fishing one of the prized corners of Saginaw Bay. Anglers come for walleye above all — big schools push through in spring and early summer — and for the yellow perch that have made the bay famous for generations.

That fishing is no small thing for a town this size. The Au Gres boat access is one of the larger launches on Lake Huron, with four ramps that can put eight boats in the water at once, plus a pier and a harbor of refuge for when the bay kicks up. On a good June morning the river is a parade of trailers and coolers before sunrise, and the charter captains who work out of here treat walleye like a profession, because around Au Gres it basically is.

So the town wears two identities, both written into its name and its water: a sandy French point on an old fur-trade map, and a working fishing port where the day starts early and smells like bait, gas, and bay water.