The Honor hatchery where Great Lakes salmon began

In the mid-1960s the lower Great Lakes were a mess. A flood of alewives — small, oily ocean fish that had slipped in through the shipping canals — were dying off by the millions and rotting on the beaches. Michigan’s answer came out of a quiet hatchery on the Platte River near Honor: stock a Pacific salmon that would gorge on alewives and give anglers something thrilling to chase. In 1966 the first coho salmon were released here, and the gamble worked so well it created a billion-dollar Great Lakes sport fishery almost overnight.

The Platte River State Fish Hatchery had started life back in 1928 as a trout station, but after the coho experiment it was rebuilt into Michigan’s salmon house and reopened in 1975. Today it is the only hatchery in the state that raises coho, and it still supplies essentially all the coho the DNR stocks, along with Chinook and Atlantic salmon. It is also the main spot where biologists collect coho eggs for the upper Great Lakes.

The most dramatic time to come is fall. A weir — a barrier of bars across the river downstream toward the lake — stops the grown salmon as they surge back from Lake Michigan to spawn, and crews lift them out by the thousands to strip eggs and milt for the next generation. The river boils with fish, the gulls wheel overhead, and the whole cycle that started with a 1960s hunch plays out in front of you.

Honor leans into all this with a salmon festival each August, but the working hatchery up the road is where the fish that fill the Platte, the Betsie, and half the Lake Michigan coast actually come from.