Paris — Just north of Big Rapids is a quaint crossroads with a cabinet maker, a taxidermist, a pizza joint, an antique dealer—and a scale model of the Eiffel Tower, of course.
There are at least 23 towns in the U.S. named after the French capital, but ours is not one of them. John Parish platted this village of 270 souls in 1865, and after a fire about a decade later, the “h” fell off the town’s name. “Parish” became “Paris.”
This little village was once home to the state’s second fish hatchery. The Paris Fish Hatchery opened in 1881, and salmon and brown trout fingerlings got their start here until 1964. The pools are now dry, but the community has made periodic efforts to spruce the place back up and maybe raise walleye.
Now the hatchery is part of Paris Park, where the main attraction is a 1/50th scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. It’s only 20 feet tall, compared with the Paris monument at over 1,000 feet tall. And unlike the famous wrought-iron tower, it wasn’t put together by a famous architect.
In 1980, some high school students from the Mecosta-Osceola Career Center in Big Rapids found a stash of old bed frames in a nearby barn. The frames were used in the temporary bunkhouses that housed government workers who upgraded the hatchery for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.
Those students embarked on an engineering and welding project that remains sturdy to this day. The park urges visitors not to climb it, but of course, people do.
The replica used to be out in the woods, but the park spent $20,000 to move it last year (a further testament to its sturdiness that they could). It now sits near the parking lot on a concrete pad and can be seen from the Fred Meijer White Pine Trail, a 92-mile paved path that stretches from Grand Rapids to Cadillac.
Michigan’s Eiffel Tower is one of those small, good things. Something to break up the endless tree line along a bike path, something that keeps Paris more than a dot on the Census map.
Mark Naida is editor of Michigan Enjoyer.
