DEERTON

Region: Pictured Rocks/Munising/Au Train

Driving between Marquette and Au Train, when you see the green sign for "Deerton," you might think there's some mistake. On M-28 there's just a lonely post office. Turn south onto Deerton Road, however, and in a mile you'll come to the railroad grade where, in 1882, the Detroit, Mackinac & Marquette Railroad built a station that became the nucleus of Deerton.
Here as elsewhere, logging came first, and then the cutover land was sold as small subsistence farms, usually to people who had worked in the lumber camps. Today much of Deerton's rural landscape is abandoned and overgrown. It could seem poetic or depressing, depending on how you feel about weathered houses and ancient junk cars.

The center of this dispersed rural community is the Deerton School, a tidy 1926 brick building at the corner of Deerton-Onota Road. It's the elementary school of Onota and AuTrain townships, with 40 or so pupils from kindergarten through sixth grade. The schoolyard is graced with gardens of vegetables, flowers, sometimes herbs, the joint school-community project. It changes from year to year, depending on children's ideas — like the tipi for beans.

Kids at bigger schools would make mincemeat of this charming landscaping. It's fun for Deerton children to come back in fall and see the garden, and have corn on the cob for lunch. Students from Deerton join another elementary school to attend Superior Central High School in Eben, where graduating classes range from 35 to 45. Even so, videoconferenced classes with Marquette High School enable students to take less common classes like German.

West a short ways on Deerton-Onota Road brings you to the Onota Township Hall. Turn south onto Peter White Road. In about three miles you will come to the north edge of The Nature Conservancy's Laughing Whitefish Lake Preserve. (See below.)

Peter White Road turns into a two-track a ways after Whitefish Lodge. You can take it all the way to Laughing Whitefish Falls in Sundell — but only if it's not spring mud season and it hasn't rained for a few days—and if your car has fairly high clearance, like a minivan and not a subcompact car.

Return to Pictured Rocks/Munising/Au Train

PLACES AROUND DEERTON TO

Eat Sleep Camp