This Steel Sturgeon Is Michigan's Best Fish Statue
There are a few other trout-like contenders, but Port Huron’s mascot is hard to beat
Port Huron — Where can you find the best statue of a fish in Michigan? For a state surrounded by the Great Lakes, and a long history of fishing both for food and for fun, it’s not as easy a question as you might think. There’s fierce competition across the state, but only one can be the real winner.
My sleeper pick—Port Huron’s magnificent steel sturgeon statue, hidden along the banks of the St. Clair River.
She even has a lovely name. Stella Clair, a 1,500-pound steel sturgeon fabricated by South Haven welding artist Lou Rodriguez in 2014. Stella the sturgeon is easily the cutest metal mascot for the Port Huron area that you’ll find, with the Blue Water Bridge coming in a distant second place.
Stella proves an interesting fish statue for a few reasons. She’s placed unceremoniously right on the river bank, just on the dirt and the rocks, heavy enough to stay in place on her own. It’s as close as you’ll get to her natural habitat, swimming the estuary of the St. Clair River, washed up along the shore.
Her exaggerated metal features highlight the already strange aesthetics of the sturgeon, a primordial fish that’s been swimming around for millennia. The sturgeon’s smooth scales are formed as metal sheathing, giving Stella an armor-plated appearance. The sturgeon’s whiskers formed as big steel points, the beady eyes as massive roundels.
She’s a fitting portrait of these living fossils from the Cretaceous period, accepting and embracing the strangeness of the sturgeon’s appearance and giving it new personality.
The placement on the riverbank puts Stella in the native context of the sturgeon, an important detail and distinct from the other prominent fish statues found in Michigan.
Baldwin’s trout statue, for one, posits a sort of ascendance of the humble trout, a larger-than-life trout jumping in the air in the middle of a park. Stella, however, is grounded, in the same muck and mire the bottom-feeding sturgeon traverses on a daily basis.
This is crucial, because the outward goal of this statue is to promote the conservation of the Great Lakes Sturgeon.
Prized for their roe, the true delicacy known as caviar, the sturgeon faced enormous pressure from overfishing and invasive species throughout the 20th century. Michigan listed the sturgeon as a threatened species in 1994, banning commercial fishing of the species outright.
Sport fishing is still allowed, to a very limited degree, and remains highly popular as a grail trip for dedicated Great Lakes fishers. Guided charters often head out through the northern estuary of the St. Clair, usually looking for sturgeon in the early morning just before sunrise.
Most fishers, in this case, practice catch-and-release with sturgeon. It’s enough to simply catch one of these historic fish, take a nice picture, and let it go.
Sturgeon meat is well regarded, and the fish are big enough to feed a crowd, but desire to conserve the species wins out. That and, of course, the same concerns about the bioaccumulation of toxins we all worry about with Great Lakes fish.
At any rate, sturgeon-maxxing is clearly popular in the Port Huron area, which hosts an annual summer Sturgeon festival and seems to have adopted the fish as its local mascot of sorts.
So if you’re not heading out on a boat to catch a sturgeon anytime soon, and don’t fancy a trip over to the Belle Isle Aquarium either, a walk down the river to check out Stella Clair is easily the best way for you to get your sturgeon fix. In my view, she just might be the best fish statue in all of Michigan.
