Waterford's nature center used to raise fish by the millions

The walking trails that wind through the Drayton Plains Nature Center run past the ghosts of fish ponds. For most of the last century this was a working state fish hatchery — one of Michigan’s busiest — and the dug rearing pools and the channels that fed them are still part of the lay of the land.

The state opened the hatchery here in the early 1900s on the banks of the Clinton River, choosing the spot for its clean, cold spring water. At first the job was raising bass fingerlings to stock Michigan’s lakes; over time the work shifted toward sport fish — brown trout, rainbow trout, brook trout — sent out by the thousands to keep the state’s fishing strong. The river itself does something unusual here, splitting into a double channel as it slides under Hatchery Road on its long run toward Lake St. Clair, and that quirk of water made the place ideal.

The hatchery ran for close to 60 years before the state shut it down in the early 1960s. Land like that doesn’t stay empty for long. In 1967 a group of locals reopened it as a private, nonprofit nature center, trading fish ponds for foot trails and classrooms. Waterford Township took over in 2006 and locked in its future, granting a permanent conservation easement so the ground could never be built on.

What’s left is a 138-acre patchwork of the kind of habitat that’s getting rare in busy Oakland County — white pine forest, a wet meadow, a scrap of woodland prairie — laced with about four miles of trail. The fish are long gone, but the spring water still runs, the river still forks, and on a quiet morning the only thing rising out of the old hatchery ponds is mist.