Paris Park, where the state raised trout and shipped them in milk cans

The little community of Paris owes its claim to fame to a creek and a railroad. In 1881 Michigan’s fish commissioners picked the spot where Cheney Creek runs toward the Muskegon River, right alongside the Grand Rapids & Indiana tracks, and built one of the state’s earliest fish hatcheries there. The cold, steady spring water was perfect for raising trout and salmon; the rail line meant the young fish could be loaded up and sent anywhere in Michigan.

And sent they were, by the millions, in milk cans painted a bright red so no one mistook them for anything else. The cans rode in railroad baggage cars, the most famous of which was a special fish car called the Wolverine that hauled fingerlings around the state from 1913 to 1938, until trucks finally took over the job. Crews would meet a train, swing the red cans down, and pour a fresh start for some far-off lake or stream into the water.

The hatchery worked for over eighty years. WPA crews rebuilt and expanded the ponds in the 1930s, and the place kept rearing fish until 1964, when the state shut it down. The county stepped in and turned the grounds into Paris Park, with the old rearing ponds, a campground, and a small zoo, so the spot that once shipped trout statewide became a place to pitch a tent and feed the ducks.

Time has been hard on the ponds — some have gone dry and a few structures have caved in — and a local group called Save the Ponds is trying to bring the historic basins back to life. Stand at the edge of one on a quiet morning and you can almost hear the clatter of red cans coming off a train.