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 on Deerton Road, however, and in a mile you'll come to the railroad grade. There, in 1882, the Detroit, Mackinac & Marquette Railroad built a station that became the nucleus of Deerton. Here as elsewhere, logging came first. Then the cutover land was sold as small subsistence farms, usually to people who had worked in the lumber camps. Today Deerton's rural landscape is largely abandoned and overgrown. It could seem poetic or depressing, depending on how you feel about weathered houses and old junk cars.
The center of this dispersed rural community is the Deerton School, a tidy brick 1926 building at the corner of Deerton-Onota Road. It's the elementary school of Onota and Au Train townships, with an enrollment of around 50 pupils from kindergarten through sixth grade. The schoolyard is graced with gardens of vegetables, flowers, sometimes herbs. A joint school-community project, it changes from year to year, depending on children's ideas. Kids enjoy coming back in fall to see the mature 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. Videoconferenced classes enable students to join Marquette High School students to take less common classes like German.

Going west on Deerton-Onota Road brings you to the Onota Township Hall. Turn south there onto Peter White Road and in about three miles you will come to the north edge of the Laughing Whitefish Lake Preserve.
Peter White Road turns into a two-track a ways after Whitefish Lodge. You can take it all the way to Laughing Whitefish Falls (see 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.

Return to Pictured Rocks/Munising/Au Train

PLACES AROUND DEERTON TO

Eat Sleep Camp