Harsens Island and the Largest Freshwater Delta in North America

Where the St. Clair River fans out into Lake St. Clair, it has built something remarkable: the largest freshwater delta in North America, a vast maze of marshes, channels, and low islands. The biggest of those islands, on the Michigan side, is Harsens Island.

All those winding waterways earned the area a nickname — “the Venice of Michigan” — and made it a paradise for ducks, fish, and the people who hunt and watch them. Much of the island and the surrounding flats is protected as state wildlife land, a vital stopover on the migratory bird flyways. For more than a century, the only way to drive there has been a little car ferry from Algonac.

The island also remembers a glamorous past. In the Gilded Age, steamers carried Detroiters out to grand hotels and a busy amusement park here. And in 1872, a group of Detroit sportsmen founded a hunting-and-fishing retreat that survives as The Old Club — a private Victorian club whose members over the decades reportedly included Henry Ford and other big Detroit names. Today, Harsens Island is a quiet, watery world apart — barely an hour from Detroit, and yet a world away from it.