Biohazard Cleanup Near North Algonac Algonac, MI

Algonac is a small city in St. Clair County, Michigan, at the southern end of the St. Clair River, just before the river splits into the broad delta known as the St. Clair Flats.

European-American settlement began in 1805 when John Martin settled an area the French had called Pointe Du Chêne, meaning Point of the Oak.

Algonac's present name was coined by the ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft and applied to the area in 1843, and in 1836 it had been the fourth village laid out by Americans along the St. Clair River.

Algonac was incorporated as a village in 1867 and became a city exactly a century later, in 1967.

The 2020 census counted 4,196 people in Algonac, and at the 2010 census the city had 1,756 households packed into just 1.44 square miles.

Algonac is the founding home of Chris-Craft Boats — Christopher Columbus Smith began building boats there as a 13-year-old in 1874, and the company that grew from his workshop became one of the world's largest builders of pleasure boats, headquartered in Algonac for decades.

Between 1921 and 1932, Smith and speedboat racer Gar Wood built ten famous Miss America racing boats in Algonac, and Wood's Miss America X set a world water speed record of 124.91 miles per hour in 1932.

Boat building ran so deep in Algonac that from 1947 through the early 1960s Algonac High School actually offered a boat-building program in its curriculum.

Algonac bills itself as the Pickerel Capital of the World, reflecting its long fishing heritage on the St. Clair River.

A five-acre riverfront park and long boardwalk along the St. Clair River give residents front-row views of the Great Lakes freighters passing between Lake St. Clair and Lake Huron.